In The Depths
by Aloysius in Flyte
Summary: When an unwelcome figure from the girls' past returns to the Gold Coast, the mermaids are faced with some unpleasant realities. Caught up in the middle, Zane Bennett is just trying to protect the friends he hopes to one day regain - and the choices he makes set them all on a course they never expected. A story about a merman. Set after final episode of Season 3.
1. Prologue

Prologue

Lewis watched his old friend - his rediscovered friend - pacing across his living room floor. He was worried he might start making divots in the new wooden floors, but he kept quiet. He knew Zane was having a hard time and, compared to everything that had happened, scuffed floors were the least of everyone's worries. Cleo had called just a few minutes before that to let him know she was on the way home from work. He had weakly responded that he had a surprise for her when she got home. Trying to figure out how he was going to explain Zane's presence and everything he had told him, he had an urge to join him in pacing and wearing the floorboards down.

Zane was muttering to himself and Lewis shivered, recalling some of the 'highlights' that he had learned about. He couldn't imagine how difficult it must have been for Zane to come here and tell him everything - what had happened in the last six years, the dangers that had surfaced now. How his attempts to fix things on his own had failed.

"When does she get home?" Zane suddenly stopped in his pacing and stared intently at Lewis. That stare, the look he gave him, was nothing short of terrifying. When had he learned to look through people like that, Lewis wondered to himself.

"She should be here in 15 minutes," Lewis said, trying to keep his tone light. "What should we..."

He stopped himself as Zane continued to stare at him.

"Where do we start?" Lewis finally said helplessly.

"We get her to call Rikki," Zane said firmly. "She'll listen to Cleo, she'll stop this."

"I don't know if she will," Lewis said quietly, and instantly hushed at the look Zane gave him.

"What do you mean?" Zane demanded. "She's her friend. She has to listen to her. She'll understand how serious this is."

Lewis shook his head, not daring to look at Zane's burning eyes.

"She hasn't so far," he said. "And we've tried to talk to her, believe me."

Zane made a noise that was halfway between a groan and a scoff.

There was a sound from the front of the house, the door opening, and then Cleo's voice rang out down the corridor. Zane whirled on him and Lewis flinched again. He didn't know why he was so afraid of his old friend. And he realised, with a sudden sharpness in his gut, that he really was afraid of him.

"You said fifteen minutes," Zane growled.

"I guess she was closer than I realised," Lewis said, standing up and moving towards the door where Cleo would be coming in.

Zane grabbed his shoulder and stared into his eyes again. There was urgency there. And fear.

"We only tell her what she needs to know," he whispered fiercely.

Lewis nodded as he saw Cleo walk into the room. Zane instantly released his shoulder and whirled around to face her.

"Zane!" Cleo exclaimed. She had a laptop bag in her arms and it hit the floor. She stumbled forward. "Oh, my God. What are you doing here? Does Rikki know?"

Lewis watched as Zane suddenly went from wound-up, hostile and fierce to a kind of meekness he had not expected. Cleo had had this effect on him.

"I'm here because of Rikki," he said, not looking at her, not looking at anything but his own shoes. His long-sleeved shirt stuck to his body - Lewis noticed for the first time that he was perspiring heavily, despite the air conditioner running on high in the house.

"What about Rikki?" Cleo asked anxiously, glancing over to Lewis with many, many questions in her eyes.

"She's in danger, Cleo," Zane said softly. "She's in so much danger, and I can't save her on my own."

Lewis realised he was starting to feel a bit ill. He remembered the last time Zane had come spouting doom like this. He hadn't listened then. None of them had.


	2. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

_Six years earlier_

The sun was high overhead and very, very hot as Lewis walked along the beach to meet his friends. He had slept late yet again, a habit he knew he would need to break soon. He wouldn't even have time to fully adapt to the time zone - his plane back to the US departed tomorrow. It was a short visit, only a week, but he would never have forgiven himself if he had not been there to see his girlfriend graduate. He smiled to himself as he walked along, thinking of her happy surprise. His smile widened as he reminisced of the time they spent together, alone, after the celebrations had died down. That had definitely been worth a full day of travel.

He had suggested, today, a picnic lunch by the water, on their favourite stretch of beach. There were shady spots and he hoped the others were already there, settled close to the water in the shade, near enough to enjoy the breeze, but still far enough away to avoid the spray from the waves. Even though the beach was out of the usual way, and not very popular, there was no point for the girls to take unnecessary risks.

Risks like the one now walking briskly towards him, looking extremely agitated. Lewis considered swerving, pretending he wasn't headed towards the private beach but decided that avoiding Zane would be a cowardly move and he was done with cowardice. Lewis found that his main feelings toward his friend (_former_ friend, he had to remind himself) were more of disappointment than of anger. He felt sad that Zane had once again thrown away friendship - and Rikki's affections - for the sake of greed. You'd have thought that he had enough money.

"Lewis!" Zane called out, finally coming up to him, and Lewis stood still, crossing his arms in front of him with a furrowed brow.

"Yeah?" he asked.

Zane didn't seem to notice the disapproving look, or at least ignored it, as he announced dramatically "She's back."

"Who?" Lewis asked, now slightly bewildered.

He hadn't seen Zane since arriving home, but Cleo had filled him in on his part in the moon pool's destruction. Surely Zane would have thought that Lewis would have heard by now and wasn't about to fake being chummy, that everything was fine again.

Then again, the grimness in Zane's face didn't suggest that things were in any way OK.

"Linda Denman," said Zane, the name turning into a snarl.

Lewis felt a shock go through him. He hadn't thought of the marine biologist in years, which itself was a wonder, given the risk she had posed to his best friends - and continued to pose. But maybe it was the source of the news or just denial. Either way, he decided to tamp down his rising worry. He schooled his face to display no strong emotions.

"So?" Lewis said coldly. "She's a marine researcher. This area is prime for marine research."

He extended his hand towards the sea, as if to demonstrate the obvious.

Zane frowned, but carried on.

"It's too convenient," he said. "Come on, Lewis. She goes quiet, we don't see her for two years, then out of nowhere she's back just as we all finish school? You don't think she's thought this through?"

Lewis shook his head.

"Really? Timing is your argument?" he asked. "I mean, it's awfully convenient timing for you to ride to the girls' rescue after screwing up as badly as you did."

Zane clenched his teeth.

"I'm not here for me," he said. "I thought I should tell—"

"Me?" Lewis finished for him. "Why not tell Rikki?"

"Rikki isn't speaking to me," Zane said, hanging his head.

"I'm not surprised," Lewis scoffed.

"Are we going to stand here trading insults?" Zane said, finally showing a bit of anger. "Or are you going to warn the girls? You don't have to tell them I told you. Just... warn them. Please."

He paused and looked down at his hands.

"Please," he repeated quietly.

Lewis let his mask drop for just a moment.

"You're really worried," he spoke the thought aloud. "What happened?"

Zane looked at him with real gratitude.

"I was in the marina and she came up to me," he said. "She didn't threaten me or anything but she asked how my 'friends' were doing, and wouldn't she just love to see them again. She mentioned that she was at graduation."

Lewis saw Zane tense up, and he realised the gravity of what he had just said.

"She's been watching them," Lewis breathed. He could feel a knot form in the pit of his stomach. "I've got to go tell them."

He looked up the slight rise ahead of him. Behind the sand dunes was the little private beach where his friends were waiting for him with a picnic. Where his girlfriend was waiting for him. Zane followed his line of sight and sighed.

"What made you do it?" Lewis asked, mentally kicking himself for engaging further with Zane.

"I don't know," Zane said, and it sounded genuine to Lewis. "I really don't. Maybe things were going too well and I needed the conflict. Doesn't matter. Rikki will never forgive me for this."

Lewis didn't know what to say to that and they stood there together for a few seconds, listening to the hiss of the surf and the seagulls crying nearby.

"Don't—" Zane said, slightly strangled. "Maybe don't tell them I told you."

Lewis frowned.

"I want them to take this seriously," Zane said. "And if they think I'm just trying to get their attention, make up with Rikki... you said it yourself. It's awfully convenient for me to come and be the big hero here."

Lewis nodded and looked again at Zane. So much had changed since they had been kids. Some of it for the better. Some of it... not so much.

"I won't say anything about you," Lewis agreed. "But if she comes to you again, let me know, OK? I'm leaving tomorrow but I want to know what's going on. And if I need to tap you in to watch out for the girls, then..."

Zane looked as if he was about to argue, but he closed his mouth again without saying anything.

"Just go," he said, dejected, looking up towards the rise again.

***ITD***

Lewis approached the girls and Will with a grim kind of smile, and while they all greeted him, Cleo immediately picked up on the fact that something wasn't right.

"What happened?"

Lewis sighed. He hated lying, but Zane was right. They wouldn't take it as seriously if he admitted that the message had come from him.

"I saw Denman today," he said quietly.

The girls, including Bella, hushed instantly and Cleo gulped. Rikki motioned to him to keep talking.

"She's been watching you, I think," Lewis continued. "Or so she said. She was at the graduation ceremony. And she said something about how she'd love to see you again. It could be nothing. She could be bluffing. Or..."

"Or..." Rikki continued his thought, "She figured out that we're not all the way back to normal."

Lewis nodded.

"Yeah, that's what's got me worried."

"Who is Denman?" Will broke in. While Bella had heard the story about the mad scientist who had almost kidnapped Rikki, Cleo and their friend Emma, Will hadn't quite gotten the full briefing. Rikki and Cleo quickly amended that, and he listened to them with increasing shock.

"Guys," he said, seriously, "Do you even understand how much trouble you could have been in?"

Rikki rolled her eyes.

"Yes, of course," she said. "Why do you think we're feeling jumpy now?"

Will wasn't quite so blasé about it, however.

"You can't seriously tell me you are only 'jumpy'," he said. "She knows your secret! And she's a marine biologist! I mean..."

He paused, because Bella was giving him a look.

"We know," Cleo said. "Obviously, we know. But she hasn't been seen or heard of here in years. We thought it was fine."

"What if she's already seen something?" Will said anxiously. "What if she saw you?"

This last was directed at Bella.

"If she saw something," Lewis said, trying to be reasonable, "She would have already acted. She knows that water is the trigger. So if she wanted to she could have thrown water at them during graduation. Maybe she's just bluffing."

Will shook his head but decided to let it drop for now.

"So what next?" Bella asked.

"We stay out of the water and out of the public eye," Cleo said. She had matured considerably in the last few years, from the carefree, sometimes silly girl she had been to a bright young woman who understood all the nuances and complexities of their circumstances. Lewis smiled to himself as he reflected on that change.

Rikki nodded her agreement.

"Let's not give her any ammunition to use against us," she said. "And maybe let's give Emma a call and make sure she's doing OK and hasn't had any unexpected visitors."

Lewis was about to tell Will about the role he'd like him to play, given he would be leaving the country shortly, but Rikki broke in.

"Do we tell Zane?"

Cleo and Bella both looked at her intently and Will frowned.

"What does Zane have to do with this?" he asked.

"Kind of everything," Rikki mumbled. "He's the reason we got caught by Denman in the first place. Sort of."

Will's expression would have been comical if the situation wasn't so serious.

"You've got to be joking," he said. "I mean, what the hell? Just when I think that asshole couldn't sink any lower."

Rikki tried to explain, half-heartedly, how Zane hadn't meant to expose them. She also clarified that without Zane, they wouldn't have gotten free. But Will had formed his opinion, and Bella and Cleo were also clearly not so keen to have Zane form part of the group again, even if there might be safety in numbers.

"I'll tell Zane about her being back," Lewis said, annoyed with himself for how the lie was twisting itself around. "Just in case she approaches him, you know?"

The group agreed, and Lewis bowed his head. Why couldn't this last day have just been a bit of relaxation and time with his friends and girlfriend? Clearly, nothing was easy when you were dating a mermaid.


	3. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

He had never been very patient or comfortable with uncertainty. So between the experience he had just had with Linda Denman, the conversation with Lewis and the extremely uncertain outcome of the next few days and weeks, Zane was basically in hell. He shuddered to remember the awful moment when Denman had approached him, while he was packing up to leave the cafe for the day. _Rikki's _cafe, and he wondered, not for the first time, whether he would have to change the name.

Denman's words, her attitude, her purring confidence and malice - it all made him realise that they had been kidding themselves when they thought they were out of the woods after that awful day in the cave. They would never get away from Linda Denman's ambitions and schemes. Zane had concluded that she must have found a new source of funding. He only wondered what that funding might be for - whether someone might have believed a tall tale about girls who magically turned into mermaids. Certainly, that was her implication.

Zane spun around on his heel after a moment of staring after Lewis in the direction he had moved. He desperately wanted to join him, and to convey to all of his friends (_former friends_, an insidious voice in his head whispered) just how serious this situation was. She knew, she must have known, or she wouldn't have come to him. She was baiting him, to get to them, and he also wondered whether he wasn't playing into her hands by bringing this to their attention. Still, what choice did he have?

Sighing, he started to trudge away, back towards his own house. He'd delivered the message to Lewis and he'd see what happened next. He'd been clear that he was at their disposal when it came to any actions that needed to be taken. He would even face Denman again. It was an unpleasant thought, that this small woman was someone he feared, yet he couldn't get away from it. She terrified him because when he saw her, he saw traces of his own ambition and he feared what he could still become.

As he walked through his own front door, he heard his father call out to him and, with a sigh, walked towards his study.

"What is it, Dad?" he asked, standing at the entrance of the large, wood-panelled room and leaning on the doorframe.

"Stand up straight," his dad said imperiously, casting a look at him up and down. "What's this I hear about you bothering Linda Denman again?"

Whatever Zane was expecting to hear, it wasn't this. He gaped for a moment, and he opened his mouth to provide a retort, before closing it again.

"We've had our differences," Harrison continued, pulling a face at the memory of the 'differences'.

"You must be joking," Zane burst in. "'Differences'?! She kidnapped my girlfriend and my friends. She tried to make them into lab rats. She—"

"That's enough!" Harrison said. "You don't need to remind me of what happened. But listen to me when I tell you to leave her alone. I don't need to hear that you're stalking her or threatening her, do you understand?"

Zane wanted to ask where exactly his father had heard these wild accusations, and why he thought there was any merit in them. He wanted to be perfectly clear that, as far as he was concerned, the less time he spent in Linda Denman's company the better. But instead he nodded and turned to leave.

"What happened to you, son?" he heard from behind him, and he stiffened, but did not turn around. He stayed rooted to the spot.

"You had so much promise, so much ambition. And now, you're just another kid with no real plans or future."

Zane stood still and he felt his face flame with the insult. He wanted to disappear from this moment and this place in time. He wanted to be with Rikki, who didn't want him to be anything except himself. But that was over, too.

"Look at me when I speak to you, Zane," his father growled, and Zane knew that menacing tone only too well.

Zane turned around to face his father at last. He slowly raised his eyes and it took everything in him not to look away.

"I found someone who taught me that I'm a better man than you," he said slowly, allowing each word to convey the extent of his anger and hatred.

Harrison did not respond immediately but, for a moment, he had the decency to look affronted. Then, without a word and very quickly, he walked up to his son and grabbed him by the collar and pushed him up against the wall of his office. A framed certificate wobbled as Zane's shoulder was driven into it.

"You may think you're clever. You may even think that you're right. But remember this: I am the only reason anyone has ever looked at you twice," Harrison said with real venom. "And if you ever decide to try life on your own, I won't be there to help when you come home crying."

With that, he released Zane and walked back to his own desk.

Zane stood still as he watched him go, his breathing heavy as he processed those words. He fled the room as quickly as he could and it was only when he was upstairs in his own bedroom that he realised he was blinking back tears. He stopped and stilled himself, breathing slowly the way his therapist had taught him. That particular experience hadn't been one he had signed up for, and his father reluctantly agreed to it when the counsellor at his private school had suggested it, but he found that he had at least learned a few ways to manage himself better.

He lay back on his bed and closed his eyes, blocking out the day, his encounter with Denman and the last few, horrible moments with his father. There had been a time when he might have called Rikki and let himself forget his home life in her arms. There had even been a time when he might have told her some of what had happened between him and Harrison. But those days were definitely gone now. And even he didn't believe the words he had said to his father - he wasn't a better man at all.

H2OH2OH2OH2OH2OH2OH2OH2OH2OH2OH2OH2OH2OH2OH2OH2OH2O

Zane hadn't received a phone call from Lewis or anybody else by the time he woke up the next morning. There was a text from Nate asking if he'd be interested in taking the boat out for the day and picking up some girls, but apart from that, nothing.

He wondered whether Lewis had actually taken him seriously and shared what had happened with Denman with the others. Maybe he thought the whole thing was a joke, or a vain attempt to get their attention. He groaned to himself and slowly rolled out of bed, gradually getting dressed and hoping that he could avoid his father while leaving the house.

Luck was on his side, or maybe the fact that it was a Monday and he was at work, but he managed to avoid another confrontation and he fled the house, working his way towards the cafe. It was still his responsibility, even though he didn't want to be there, in the reminder of what he had lost. As he walked through the door, he realised he'd be setting up and running the show by himself today. He'd fired Sophie, after all, and Rikki wasn't coming to help. He was just finishing setting out the chairs when he heard someone come inside.

"Not open yet," he said, without looking up. "Come back in 5."

"I'm not after a juice," the woman said silkily, and he felt himself freeze. He looked up and sure enough, Linda Denman was standing there. Her hair was unbound and she was wearing a bright sundress patterned with purple flowers. She looked much younger than he was used to seeing her.

"We're not open," Zane repeated, trying his best to keep any kind of expression off of his face. He wasn't great at keeping a poker face in the best of times, and this certainly wasn't that.

"Oh, won't you make an exception for me?" she said with a smile. "After all, I'm pretty sure your dad paid for this little project and I'd just hate to have to go to him and tell him you've been rude to me. Again."

Zane couldn't quite believe what was happening. Was she goading him? Had she actually come to harass him and then tell his father that _he_ was bothering _her_? What the hell did she want?

"What would you like?" Zane said through gritted teeth, offering up an insincere smile as he looked into her eyes.

"A mermaid or two," she said, without skipping a beat. "But that's not why I'm here."

"Why are you here, exactly? What do you want?"

She said nothing for a moment, casting her eye around the space and walking towards a table to pick up a menu.

"I wanted to tell you, definitively, that I want nothing to do with your friends," she said, finally, looking at him as she walked closer. He knew it was silly for him to be afraid of this tiny woman, but he realised that was glad there was a counter between him and her.

"I know that," he said. "That's been the case for years."

"Yes, well…" she said, playing with the corner of the menu she had picked up. "That's not exactly been true. I realised shortly after our little encounter two years ago that I couldn't very well just kidnap three teenagers and expect no repercussions. But that doesn't mean I haven't been looking at other options."

Despite himself, Zane knew he had to ask the question she wanted him to ask.

"What other options?" he asked, realising that his heart was racing and trying to still his breathing.

Denman put the menu down at last, on the counter that separated them, and looked at Zane again, craning her neck slightly to make sure she got eye contact.

"Making what I need for myself," she said.

"What?" Zane said, feeling stupid and picturing Denman trying to manufacture a mermaid in a factory.

"The island made your friends into mermaids," she said. "It controls that power. That cave controls that power. That's my method, all I need is the raw material. I'm working on that part. But I think I have another three weeks or so to sort that out."

Zane blinked a few times, trying to clear his thoughts. If she was implying what he thought she was implying, then…

"I don't know what you're talking about," Zane said, hoping that he sounded convincing. "But I don't appreciate you trying to intimidate me. Or my friends."

Linda's expression turned fierce then, the playful mask falling away, and Zane realised that the nonchalance, the non-threatening outfit, was all a ploy. She was trying to lull him into something like acquiescence and he wasn't going to fall for it.

"Then let me make myself clear," she said, her voice almost a whisper. "I am going to be on that island in three weeks, when the moon is full. I am going to get what I need. You and your friends can either stay out of my way, or we can revisit our time together two years ago. Make sure you pass that message on to Emma, Rikki and Cleo."

Without another word, she turned around and strolled out of the cafe, leaving Zane stunned. He stood there for another minute, desperately trying to process what she had said, when he heard his phone ring.

"H-hello?" he answered, and inwardly cursed at himself for taking a call at a time like this.

"Zane?" the voice on the other end crackled a bit. "Hey, it's Lewis."

"Lewis," Zane repeated, still trying to get his thoughts together. He had to tell Lewis.

"Yeah," Lewis said, and then, after a pause, "Is everything ok?"

"No," Zane said shakily. "She was just here. Denman. She said she knows about…"

He stopped talking then. This was not something he wanted to discuss extensively over the phone.

"Where are you, can I come talk to you in person?"

"I'm at the airport," Lewis said. "Plane's taking off soon. Listen, I told the girls about what happened yesterday, they're going to be careful."

"No, Lewis, it's worse than that," Zane said, and he realised he was once again begging. "She knows about how they… she knows about the cave. About what happens in… in three weeks."

He was trying to be vague and hoping that Lewis was picking up the message. There was a pause on the other end.

"Lewis?"

"Still here," he responded quickly. "How does she know?"

"I have no idea," Zane said honestly. "But she came in here and said something about making what she needed. How she was still looking for raw material. Jesus, Lewis, you don't think she's talking about forcing someone against their will into—"

Lewis cursed on the other end of the line, and Zane was startled by the degree of language he was using.

"What else did she say?" Lewis asked urgently.

"Something about staying away from the island in three weeks. To pass the message on to the girls. Guess she doesn't know we're not exactly close anymore…"

Lewis was silent for another few seconds, which lasted an infinity to Zane. He had already gone to lock the cafe door. No way was he going to be able to manage today. Not on his own. Not after this.

"Here's what's going to happen," Lewis said briskly. "I'll call Cleo, she'll come find you and the four of you can hammer out a plan of action. They know this is serious, I wouldn't be asking if it wasn't. I really wish I could stay and help, but maybe it's best if I'm not there. Just… keep me in the loop. I'll call you. I'll call you as soon as I land."

"Lewis, what if she—"

"Don't even say it, ok?" Lewis bit back instantly. "She won't. You won't let her. You owe them that."

Zane swallowed but nodded at the empty room around him.

"You're right. I won't let anything happen to them."

And he knew, quite simply, he wouldn't. No matter what.

A/N: I hope you're enjoying this story! If you like it, leave me a little message. Nice to have some human connection in these dark times, hey?


	4. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Rikki hadn't expected to feel as lonely as she did after breaking up with Zane. Although she knew that the breakup had been for the best – certainly she didn't feel like she had a choice when it came to Zane's kiss with Sophie – she also felt a pang when she thought of how much she missed the way he would hold her, or the way he would stand behind her and kiss her ear when she wasn't expecting it. Maybe it was just seeing her friends being all lovey-dovey now (Cleo and Lewis were especially bad) that was making her feel this way.

But now Lewis had left, flying out back to the US and leaving behind a distraught Cleo who was pretending to be tough but probably still cried herself to sleep every night without him. And Will and Bella spent time mostly to themselves. She might even have found herself feeling fine about her new solitude, except for Lewis's startling revelation that Linda Denman had returned to the Gold Coast and approached first him, and now Zane. Bad news on multiple fronts.

Firstly, the fact that she was approaching the boys was in and of itself a bad sign. If Rikki had wanted to figure out a way to prevent some skittish mermaids from immediately running off, she'd certainly be taking the tack of approaching their nearest acquaintances. Second, it was extremely worrying that she was being so bold about talking to Lewis and Zane – even telling them explicitly that she knew how they had become mermaids and to stay away from Mako while she made a mermaid of her own. _That_ had been horrifying to learn. Even if she was bluffing, she had enough information to test her theory and prove it correct.

Worst of all, now Zane was back in her orbit.

Rikki had hoped that after graduation, and quitting her job at the café named after her, she would never see Zane again. They weren't exactly living in the same neighbourhood and these days they definitely didn't run in the same circles. But instead of being able to leave her ex, who was still someone she cared about very much, behind, she had come face to face with him yesterday.

And what a face. He had clearly internalised his responsibility for what had happened to them with Denman years ago. Even as they sat around the Sertori's dining room table and Cleo sketched out the landscape with a shaky but determined voice, while Will gave him death glares, he stared at Rikki with nothing short of longing. She had to fight to look away from him and struggled to pay attention to what Cleo was saying.

But now the plan had been set and they each had their part to play. Staying away from Mako was the critical piece. The destruction of the cave with the moon pool was foremost in all of their minds, and maybe Denman hadn't been to the cave recently to see that it was now blocked off and its magic potentially destroyed. But they couldn't check it and so they decided to send Will to check it instead. Initially, Zane had volunteered, but backed off as soon as Will told him, in no uncertain terms and with language that Rikki was surprised he knew, just how much he trusted Zane to do something so critical.

As for the three of them, Rikki, Cleo and Bella, they were going to be housebound for the next three weeks, or however long it took to get rid of Denman. Bella, in particular, was chafing at this, since she didn't even know if Denman knew about her and what she was. Rikki, meanwhile, was having to deal with the other strand of their plan – part two.

With Lewis gone, it was likely that Denman might approach Zane again, especially if she got wind of the fact that they were making moves in any direction. And they would definitely be moving against her, because whatever else might happen and whatever the cost might be, Rikki knew that she could not – she _would_ not – allow some poor innocent to become Linda Denman's lab rat. That had been the implication of the threat, that Denman intended to find someone to volunteer (_or otherwise_, Zane and Lewis had suggested darkly) to become a mermaid and then submit to her experimentation.

Somebody had to stay in touch with Zane, who would be tracking Denman's movements over the next few weeks. And although Cleo had initially, reluctantly, offered to be that person, Rikki had grudgingly volunteered. She had been clear with Zane that their only conversations would be about the business at hand, and that any attempts by him to veer off into personal conversations would be met with a sharp conclusion to any communications between them. Zane readily agreed and so far, he had stuck to his word. He gave her daily updates, by text, of Denman's activities and had not gone beyond that.

When Will had come back from his exploratory dive at Mako, and told them that the cave was still a wreck and therefore potentially useless, the threat seemed to dissipate just a little. Rikki had sent Zane a text to tell him the news, not expecting him to show up to her house shortly afterwards.

"She knows about Will being out there," Zane said in a rush, stepping through Rikki's front door when she opened it in response to his frantic knocking.

"Hello to you too," Rikki grumbled, but moved aside and took a seat on her ratty sofa in the front room. Zane didn't seem to take the hint that he was being permitted to sit down, too, so she added, "You can sit, if you like."

He looked at her, as if startled to see her there, but then quickly grabbed a seat on the ancient reclining chair that her dad favoured, and looked down at his feet.

"What makes you think she saw Will?" she asked.

"She came to see me again," he said, finally looking up but not looking at her directly. He was avoiding her gaze and she didn't understand why Zane, who was usually full of supreme confidence, was acting like a frightened kid.

"So she came to see you…" Rikki said, trying to get him to keep talking. She didn't know if this was an act meant to make her feel sympathy, but she was determined not to give him what he wanted.

"Yeah," Zane said. "Yes. I was at the café and she stopped in as I was closing. She said she knew that my friend had been out to Mako and the cave, that she thought she'd have to put up with us trying to interfere with her plans…"

"And…?"

"And then she threatened you again," he said, almost whispering the words. "She said she knows that you're still… She said she knows."

Rikki blanched, but didn't say anything for a moment.

"She can't," she said, after a minute. "Why wait around if she knows? Why try to get another mermaid if we're available?"

"I thought the same thing," Zane said miserably, "And then I realised. A volunteer would be better for her. Someone who would comply."

Rikki let those words sink in, and was about to say that no sane person would volunteer to become a science experiment, when it struck her. She had a very obvious retort all of a sudden.

"But it doesn't matter," she said. "Will said the cave is destroyed. Even if she goes there at the full moon, even if she gets her volunteer, it won't work. The moon pool is dead."

"You're sure?" Zane asked, for once looking again like the Zane she used to know, who scoffed at everything and everyone. Except for her.

"I'm sure enough," Rikki said wearily. "The truth is that if she is telling us to stay away, maybe it's time that we just do that. Especially since we know the moon pool has been destroyed. Especially if she thinks that we—"

Suddenly, Rikki stopped talking and looked at Zane. There was a fury building inside of her as a theory came to her mind.

"She never spoke to Lewis, did she?" she said.

Zane looked flustered and her suspicions seemed to be confirmed.

"No, but…"

"So, you went to Lewis and told him that Linda Denman was back and was threatening you," she said. "And Lewis is credulous and paranoid, so he believed you."

"No!" Zane exclaimed. "I mean, yes, I went to Lewis and I asked him to tell you, but…"

"But what, Zane?" Rikki exclaimed. "You can't honestly expect me to believe that out of nowhere, and weeks after we break up, the only possible reason I'd ever speak to you again crops up as an unexpected threat! What kind of bullshit have you been trying to push?"

Zane looked stricken and as though he was fighting to find the right words, and Rikki allowed her anger to overwhelm her. It was easier than trying to think about how much she wanted to take him in her arms just then.

"I didn't lie," Zane said, trying to keep his tone even and fighting what was clearly a matching outburst of temper of his own. "I went to Lewis after she came to me, and I told you the truth about everything she has said to me since. Lewis confirmed she is back in town. It's all true."

"So she's back in town," Rikki sneered. "So what? She doesn't know anything, she doesn't have any plans, and I'm betting she never came to talk to you at all. Maybe to your dad. And then you got the brilliant idea to use her being back to your advantage."

Rikki watched as Zane's face become blotchy, red spots standing out on his suddenly-pale face. And then, just as suddenly, the fight went out of him.

"You're right," he said, casting his eyes back down to her crappy carpet.

Rikki, who was in a royal temper by now, found herself winded by his sudden accession.

"What?"

"You're right," he said. "I lied. Denman came to see my dad a few days ago, and I decided it was the only way to get you to talk to me."

Rikki hadn't expected him to give up quite so quickly and she eyed him suspiciously. Where was this coming from?

"That was idiotic," was all she could think to say. "That was… that was _evil_, Zane! Do you have any idea how worried you made all of us?!"

Zane just shook his head.

"I'm sorry," he said softly, in a tone that she didn't recognise at all.

"Sorry's not fucking good enough!" she yelled at him, allowing the curse word to slip and reveal the extent of her anger. "Never, and I mean, _never_, come near me or try to speak to me again. Am I clear?"

Zane did look up at her then, finally, and his expression wasn't one of contrition, matching anger, cupidity, or anything at all. It was a kind of fear.

"I won't," was all he said, then he spun on his heel and left the house, not bothering to close the door behind him.

Rikki fumed for a few more minutes, then suddenly she pulled her phone out and started dialling Cleo. She didn't know what the others would say about this latest stunt of Zane's, but she didn't care. As far as Rikki was concerned, Zane Bennett was dead to her.

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Rikki thought that the incident at her house would be the last time she ever set eyes on Zane, but she was surprised only two weeks later, when she saw him near the docks, which she was passing on her way to Will's boathouse, with Sophie and a young brunette she didn't recognise. She ducked behind a tree when she saw the little group and watched them. She was annoyed with herself for caring about how the brunette seemed to be flirting with Zane, though slightly satisfied (and even more annoyed at her own satisfaction) to see that Zane looked supremely uncomfortable.

She couldn't hear a word that any of them said, but she did allow herself one glance back as she walked away quietly. She thought that Zane looked in her direction once, but their eyes never met and she may well have imagined it. She was pretty far away. She was distracted all that afternoon, wondering who the brunette was and why Zane would still be hanging around with Sophie when he had made his disdain for her clear ages ago. Maybe he was just that lonely.

Zane's name had become a shibboleth among their little group after she had revealed the extent of his lies, and so she didn't bother to tell them about what she had seen that afternoon. They were still keeping out of the water as much as possible – it was true, after all that, Denman was back in town and there was no reason to tempt fate. They also kept away from Mako, despite wanting very much to go back to the moon pool and start the cleanup effort.

When the full moon came and went the next week without incident (and without their heading out to Mako on the occasion), they breathed a sigh of relief. The lies that Zane had fed them had been convincing and even if there was no reason to assume that Linda knew about the moon pool or about any of them, it still seemed like some great danger had passed them by. Will had volunteered to go out to Mako that night, to give them peace of mind, but Bella had dissuaded him, assuring him that there was no reason that Denman would actually be out there and, more than that, no evidence of any kind that Zane's words had any mark of truth to them. Even Lewis, who usually preferred to have some kind of control over any situation, had told them to stay away from the island and not to worry. He was more than furious with Zane for what had come to pass.

It came as a surprise to all of them, then, that two days after the full moon, Rikki's mobile rang and Zane's voice came through on the other line. She had answered it without checking the caller ID, and cursed herself immediately.

"What the hell do you want?" she growled as she heard him say her name.

There was silence on the other end of the line, then the sound of some shuffling, and finally he spoke again.

"I just wanted to tell you that I'm leaving town," he said. "Denman came to see my dad a few weeks ago and suggested I join her as an intern."

Rikki felt her anger rising, but more than her anger, her surprise. First of all, what was Zane doing even speaking to Denman, let alone interning with her. And why did he sound so stiff and mechanical on the phone? It was like he was reading lines, not speaking to her.

"I thought I told you never to speak to me again," she said, trying to project her anger in her voice, though she couldn't hold back some of the hesitancy she was feeling.

There was an even longer pause this time, more shuffling, and she thought she heard another voice on his end of the line.

"I just thought you might like to know… that Denman was leaving," he finally said, as if having to force each word out.

"Thanks," she spat back at him. "Enjoy working with that demon."

He didn't say anything else and she was starting to feel uncomfortable. He was usually high-spirited and gave as good as he got. This subdued tone was extremely unlike him and Rikki realised, for the first time, that something might be wrong. Before she had a chance to say anything, though, he finally broke his silence.

"Goodbye, Rikki," he said, and now she could definitely hear tears in his voice. Her heart began to pound. Since when did Zane Bennett _cry_?

"Zane, what's—" she started to ask, but the line went silent and she found herself staring at her phone.

Cleo, who had heard her half of the conversation, and who had been watching her face carefully, moved closer to her.

"What did Zane want?" she asked gently.

"To tell me…" Rikki looked lost for a minute. What the hell had that call been?

"He wanted to tell me he was going to be working for Denman," she finally said. "That she was leaving town again."

Cleo's eyes widened but she didn't say anything besides, "Oh."

Rikki shook her head.

"Something wasn't right," she said. "I thought that maybe he…"

She shook her head then and looked up at Cleo, who was eyeing her with concern.

"It's another trick, isn't it?" she said to herself. "It has to be. He doesn't give up and if I try to call him back I'll just be playing into his hands!"

Cleo let Rikki work herself up into another lather and nodded along sympathetically.

"I hope I never see his stupid face again," Rikki finally said, allowing herself to put Zane firmly in her past, for what she hoped was the last time.

"I'm sure you won't," Cleo said. "He probably realises he has lost all of his chances."

Together, they consigned Zane to memory that afternoon.

It would be years until they saw him again.

A/N: I hope you're still enjoying this. I'm on a roll! Kind of a cliffhanger…


	5. Chapter 4

I hope you enjoy this chapter! A bit longer than I usually write, but I wanted to put all of this in for now.

Chapter 4

It had taken everything Zane had to leave Rikki's house after the argument. He had wanted to turn around and beg her to forgive him for everything. He had wanted to angrily confront her with the truth and the fact that he was only trying to protect _her_ and her friends. He had wanted to do a lot of things, but he didn't. Because he knew that Lewis was right. He would do anything it took to protect the mermaids, and that included acting against his own best interest in this case. Even if Rikki would be willing to take him back, this wasn't exactly the priority right now. He _owed_ them.

Denman's threat had left him feeling hollow. After those first two conversations, he knew that they would have to be subtle. Sending Will to check on the cave, even if it wasn't the best idea and certainly not what he would have preferred, was a good option. Denman didn't know Will, so what were the chances that she'd connect him with Cleo and Rikki?

Apparently still quite good. He hadn't given her enough credit for thinking ahead of them. Not for the first time, Zane was coming face to face with the fact that they were still teenagers and she was a grown woman with resources and seemingly endless patience.

He knew what he sounded like, coming to Rikki and raising endless alarms. He also knew that Rikki wasn't going to stop being suspicious and they wouldn't be as careful as he could want them to be. He wished that Lewis was still here because, even if they didn't always see eye to eye, they had a clear understanding of what it took to keep the girls safe. They both agreed tacitly that their attitude towards keeping their secret was not careful enough.

So, he lied to Rikki. He lied to protect her, even if it cost him the opportunity to ever see or be close to her again. Because Denman's threat wasn't idle, he knew that much. And he would protect them from her, just as he had promised to Lewis. Just as he had promised to himself.

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The next two weeks were torture, wondering what Rikki was up to and whether she was being careful enough, but at least Denman hadn't come to him again. He hoped that he had managed to persuade the girls to stay away from Mako for now, at least, and not give Denman any reason to interfere with their lives. However, he also knew he couldn't sit idly by.

His one hope was his father. After all, he had come to realise the monstrosity of what he would have wrought on the three mermaids and he knew exactly what Denman was capable of doing. It was why he decided, then, to go to him and tell him his concerns. He needed to know at least that he had his father in his corner, even if no one else was. Nate was game enough to hang around and have fun, but Zane knew that there was no serious matter he could discuss with him, even in the abstract. Nate wasn't exactly an abstract thinker.

As he was contemplating how to present his case to his father without getting another reprimand for "harassing" Denman, and without revealing the truth about Rikki and the others, he walked past the café. He had since given up trying to keep the place open and run it on his own. The doors were firmly shut. He gave a quick glance up at the building, the sign bearing his ex's name causing him more pain than he cared to think about.

"Zane!" a woman's voice called out to him, and he looked over to see Sophie grinning and waving. She was standing next to another woman that he didn't recognise.

"Hey," he said, unenthusiastically, not really wanting to have a conversation with the reason why he and Rikki had broken up, now seemingly for the last time. Or so he told himself.

"I want you to meet someone," she said, ignoring his lack of interest and pointing towards the other woman. She grabbed his hand and pulled him in that direction and he allowed himself to be led.

"This is Sylvia," she said, smiling. "She's a fellow entrepreneur, she's visiting from England, and she's a genius at working out how to make money out of _anything_."

Sylvia was a pretty girl, about the same age as Sophie, with dark brown hair, bright hazel eyes. Her expression seemed etched with confidence, which startled Zane a bit. There was something about that confidence that seemed ruthless, like she'd stop at nothing to get what she wanted. He had seen echoes of that expression in Sophie often enough, but it was something he most associated with Denman, especially after the last few times he had seen her.

"Sophie's exaggerating," Sylvia said, smiling at him and extending her hand. "But I hear you're quite the businessman yourself."

Zane glanced up briefly at the café, and then back again at Sylvia who had followed his gaze.

"Hardly," he said, though he did shake Sylvia's hand as she offered it.

"Only because your friends aren't supportive enough," Sophia piped up. "Right? I mean, I thought this was Rikki's thing, too."

Zane muttered, "I don't have any friends."

Sylvia laughed and Sophie gave a quick snort of laughter, too.

"Is he always this maudlin?" Sylvia asked her friend.

"Only when he's thinking about the incomparable Rikki," Sophie replied, rolling her eyes.

Zane, who had been trying to look for a way out of this increasingly uncomfortable conversation, saw just then that Rikki herself was walking past, watching them. He quickly looked back at Sylvia and Sophie, hoping that they hadn't seen her.

"Zane," Sophie started, "I just wanted you to meet Sylvia because she's been looking into some development opportunities out by Mako and I figured since you know the place so well—"

"It's a marine preserve," Zane interrupted. "You can't do any development out there."

He looked up to see if Rikki was still nearby – maybe he'd have a chance to catch her up if he left now – but she was gone.

"Yes, but—" Sophie started to say, but Sylvia cut her off.

"I'm not looking to build hotels or anything," Sylvia interrupted. "I've just been talking to this marine biologist who thinks there are amazing research opportunities on the reef near the island. Linda Denman."

Zane's blood froze in his veins. Was it a coincidence? There hadn't been any word from Denman in the last two weeks. Now, with a few days until the full moon, this woman appears and starts talking about Dr. Denman? Maybe she didn't know.

"You shouldn't talk to her," Zane said, hoping his tone was even and convincing. "She's got a bit of a reputation for some out-there things. She's not someone you want to get on your bad side, but she's not exactly someone I'd trust even if she was on your side."

Sylvia arched an eyebrow and exchanged a glance with Sophie, but nodded towards him.

"Ok," Sylvia said. "If you say so."

Zane nodded, relieved. She seemed sincere and he hoped that it was all just a bad coincidence – Sophie, Denman, this new girl. He didn't need to be dealing with any of it, not this close to the full moon and what Denman had said she'd carry out. Her words flashed back to him, about "raw material", and he realised with a start that maybe Denman was grooming this girl for her purposes. If she could be bought with promises of money and fame…

"I'm serious!" he exclaimed. "You have to promise you won't talk to her."

Sylvia looked even more surprised but nodded.

"Sure," she said. "I don't know her very well – you seem to be well-acquainted."

Sophie looked between the two of them and was about to say something, when Zane turned on his heel.

"I have to go," he said. "Just… don't go near Denman, ok?"

And without waiting for a reply, he left.

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The full moon approached and, with a few hours to go, Zane finally decided it was time to go talk to his father. He approached his study, and saw that the door was slightly ajar.

"Dad?"

"Come in, Zane," Harrison said.

As Zane walked into the room, he watched his dad's eyes narrow in response. He didn't seem to like what he was seeing.

"I need to talk to you," Zane said, fidgeting slightly, and not looking up. "About—"

"Linda Denman," his dad finished for him.

Zane did look up then, and saw a very ugly expression on his father's face.

"I told you last time, Zane," he said.

"Dad, I know, but—"

"I told you to leave Linda and her research alone."

"But if you knew what she was planning, what she _told___me she was going to—"

"I know exactly what Linda Denman is planning!" Harrison exclaimed, slamming his hands down onto his desk.

"W-what?" Zane asked, startled.

"She told me," he said, calmer this time. "And I'm funding her work."

"But…" Zane felt like the earth had opened up and he was falling. "But you can't let her hurt—"

"Who would she be hurting?" his father asked, still maintaining that calm façade, though Zane knew he was still furious underneath.

"My friends, for a start!" Zane replied, before realising that his dad might not know everything and he might have made a huge mistake by telling him.

Harrison tilted his head slightly, then shook it.

"I want to be clear, and that we're on the same page," Harrison said. "Linda has a volunteer, someone who is willing to submit to the research she hopes to undertake. That volunteer will not be harmed, and will in fact share in some of the profits of our work."

Zane knew his jaw had dropped. His father _knew_ this was about making a mermaid to experiment on, and he was still ok with it.

"How can you be like this?" Zane said, his voice shaking. "How can you think that's all that Denman would do?"

Harrison's eyes flashed but he stayed seated and only said, "Because there is a very high return on investment in the research that will be undertaken, and I've invested quite a bit in it."

For the next few months of his life, Zane would replay this moment most often, wondering just how different things might have been if he hadn't done what he had.

"You're a monster," he whispered. "And an idiot, if you think that Denman won't hurt her _volunteer_."

His father did not explode, as Zane had expected. Instead, he stood up and took out his wallet.

"I told you last time we had this conversation that you were welcome to leave if you don't agree with how things are done in this house," he said. "I meant it. But I will not take you back in. So by all means, go."

And with those words, he pulled a few bills out of the wallet and threw them across the desk to Zane, who recoiled. He had been prepared for an explosion, for yelling. Not for this calm, permanent dismissal.

"Fine," he said, trying to keep his voice from shaking too much. "Fine."

He didn't take the cash that was on the table, but he did run upstairs to pack a few things -clothes, passport, his own wallet, a picture of Rikki - in a rucksack before leaving the house. He nearly ran from his house to the dock, where his boat was moored. He hopped in, untied it and set out for Mako without much of a thought. It was starting to get dark, already, and he just hoped he wasn't too late. He didn't have time to process the fact that he had essentially just been cast out by the only family he had. There would be time for that later.

When he jumped out of the boat on the beach, not far from the path that would lead him to the moon pool, he realised that he could see movement from the trees beyond. Somebody was running.

He could see the figure moving towards him and was alarmed, as the person neared, to recognise Sylvia.

_What the hell is she doing here?_

She had finally reached him and he saw the state of her – face stained with tears, clothes dirty, no shoes. She looked like she had been running for a while and she was panting heavily.

"Zane!" she exclaimed, and he drew back slightly, the feeling of unease back in his chest.

"Oh, thank God you're here," Sylvia said, drawing in deep breaths. She suddenly broke into sobs.

"Wh-what are you doing here?" Zane asked, still wary of her. Why was she on Mako? What was this?

"I went to see Dr. Denman," she said, between panicked breaths. "And she told me she wanted to bring me out here, to see something out here on this island. The reef…"

"Why would you go to see her? I told you that—" Zane tried to counter, but was immediately interrupted.

"Please help me," Sylvia whimpered, and drew closer to Zane and he pulled back again. Something wasn't adding up.

"Help you?" he asked, feeling stupid.

"She's trying to drown me!" Sylvia exclaimed. "She tied me up and took me into this cave and—"

Zane's heart skipped a beat. He understood now. Denman wasn't looking for a volunteer at all. She was going to have whoever was available, and he guessed that Sylvia seemed like a good prospect, being foreign and not well-known in this area.

"It's going to be ok," he told her. "Just come with me, let's get you out of here, back to the city."

He put an arm around her shoulders and tried for a comforting smile. She looked up at him, and he saw that she was smiling back.

"Thank you, Zane," she said quite sincerely.

"It's fine," he said. "We need to go now, before Denman gets here."

He looked up to point towards where he had left his boat on the beach, a few steps away, and then he felt something jab into his arm. Looking down again, he saw that Sylvia was holding a syringe in her left hand, and depressing its contents into his right arm, which had been around her shoulder.

"I really am grateful," Sylvia said, all signs of distress now gone. "It's going to be ok."

"What—?" was all Zane managed before the world started to go dark.

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When Zane finally woke up, there was something irritating his wrist. He rubbed at it vaguely and was jolted awake when he felt firm metal there, like a bracelet or… handcuffs.

His eyes shot open and he looked around wildly. He was lying on a cot, and his left wrist was handcuffed to a pipe in the small room where he found himself. He was still dressed in the clothes he had been wearing before Sylvia had knocked him out on Mako. What the hell was she playing at? Didn't she know that she couldn't exactly kidnap him? And even if she did, what did she expect him to do for her?

"Good morning, sunshine," Zane heard from the sudden square of brightness in the room, alongside a door opening. He swivelled his head towards the familiar voice – Sylvia, who came into the room in lockstep with Denman. Any signs of her earlier distress were gone. She was wearing clean clothes and her hair was neatly tied up.

Zane gaped. He looked over at Denman and saw the look of hunger and excitement in her eyes. It terrified him.

"This is illegal," he said, trying to project his voice and put a sneer into it. Like he didn't care. What else was he supposed to do? "You can't just kidnap me, this is crazy."

"Nobody's kidnapping you," Denman replied calmly, though her eyes still had that slightly manic glint. "If you want to go home, you can leave."

Zane snorted and gave his handcuffed arm a shake.

"What do you call this, then?"

"Insurance," Sylvia said quickly. "Do we need to make small talk or can we just get on with it?" she said, turning away from Zane.

"Patience, Ms. Thomas," Denman smiled indulgently at her and then moved closer to Zane.

"How are you feeling?" she asked him.

Zane looked at Denman with an expression that would have probably been comical. How was he feeling? He'd been drugged and woken up chained to a wall, how was he supposed to feel? Before he could say anything however, Sylvia was speaking again.

"He's not going to say anything, look at him," she said. "Just test it out and then we know what happens next."

Denman nodded and Sylvia walked closer. As she moved in, Zane realised she was holding a small set of keys. Handcuff keys. He held out his arm, implicitly giving her permission to move forward. He wanted to use his other arm to land a punch in her smug face, but he realised that wasn't going to get him out of constraints any faster so he held still while she undid the handcuffs. As soon as they were off, he pulled his arm close into his body and began to massage his bruised wrist, glaring at Sylvia the entire time. She didn't seem to notice.

"Please come with us, Zane," Denman said, and he looked at her quickly, too, trying to find the trick. His hand went to his pocket, to check for his mobile and she seemed to understand the gesture and smirked, holding it up for him to see.

"You'll get this back momentarily," she said. "We need you to come with us first."

"Where?" Zane asked warily, not liking just how pleased the two women looked. Something was seriously wrong. And where were they? This wasn't Mako, and they weren't on a boat of any kind. Definitely solid ground.

"You'll see," Denman said, and gestured towards the door of the little room.

Zane had by now sat on the end of the cot and put his feet down. He was surprised to feel the cold ground immediately, and realised that his trainers and socks had been removed.

"What about my—?" he started to ask, but was silenced by Denman.

"You'll get everything back shortly," she said.

He got up and warily looked between the two of them, then at the door, which was completely open. Without thinking too hard about his decision, he bolted through the door, running as fast as he could on legs that were still a bit wobbly from whatever drug they had used.

He stopped as he found himself in a large space with a high ceiling, with what looked like an indoor practice pool at one end, the water glimmering in the sodium lights that illuminated the place. There were no windows, and he couldn't see any other doors that would lead to outside. He looked around himself, trying to figure out where to go as his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting.

"James, now, please," he heard someone say behind him, and then he felt someone grab him by the back of his shirt with one hand while they pinned his arms back behind him. He tried to fight but realised there wasn't much use as whoever was holding him was a good deal stronger than he was.

"In you go," the man said, as Zane realised he was being pushed towards the swimming pool. He had no time to process what was happening or why. There was just the splash, and then he was floating to the bottom. He instantly scrambled around, trying to make for the dim lights at the surface, where he could hazily see Denman, Sylvia and a large man looking at him through the water.

His head broke the surface, just as his world tilted.

It happened so quickly, it might not have been real. He was kicking his legs to keep himself afloat when suddenly, he could no longer feel his legs, or anything. Then, in moments, he felt as though his body had reformed somehow and his legs were pinioned together. He looked down at himself in alarm as he watched the eyes of the three people gathered at the poolside widen.

"It worked," Sylvia breathed. Then, triumphantly, "I told you it would work!"

Zane felt like he was tumbling down and his stomach had dropped away as though he were falling, as he looked down at himself in the water and saw that his shirt had vanished. Where his jeans-covered legs had been moments before was a long, blue tail covered in scales. He couldn't see all of it through the water, but he could feel the movement of the water over the end of the appendage. He could _feel _it.

_Fluke, it's called a fluke_, he thought idly, as he once again slipped into darkness, even as he saw hands reaching down towards him.

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When he woke up again, he realised he was cold.

He was lying on a hard surface, and the lights that shone into his eyes when he opened them were bright and painful to look at. He tried turning onto his side and found that there was something securing him to the hard surface, something across his chest and something across his knees.

Or, at least, where his knees would have been.

His arms flew up in alarm as he remembered the pool, the water, _the tail_. Instantly, he could feel each arm being grabbed and the tail (he refused to think of it as _his_ tail) was flapping wildly, though with no result. The only effect was the pain he felt as this new, foreign part of his body thwacked the hard surface. It was a table, he realised with horror, as he stared around him.

His chest was bare, apart from the strap that restrained him, and he could see that everyone had come to have a look at him, because there were now five people around him: Sylvia, Denman, the man who had pushed him into the pool and two others, one of whom he recognised as Paul, one of Denman's old flunkies.

"Calm down," hissed Sylvia, "Or we'll make you calm down."

The effect on Zane was the opposite of calm, and he began to flail more wildly, trying to get away from the prying eyes as the full horror of the moment hit him in repeated waves.

_Trapped. Trapped like an animal. Like the animal you are now._

"That's enough!" he heard a voice shout, and then he felt a hand wrap around his throat. He didn't still fast enough and he began to cough as the hand's pressure crushed his windpipe. The hand didn't move and he sputtered and coughed for a few more seconds, but he had stopped moving and his eyes darted frantically between his captors.

"Please," he whispered, hating himself for sounding so pathetic. "Please."

"Please what?" Sylvia said. "You want to go home?"

Zane nodded as much as possible with the large hand still wrapped around his neck. He was trying very hard not to cry.

"You want to go home to your father? Like this?" Sylvia asked sceptically, smirking, and he watched her exchange a glance with Denman.

"Yes," he whispered. "Please."

"He won't take you in," Denman said confidently. "You really think I would have just done what I did without being sure I wouldn't have Harrison Bennett after me? I know he's basically disowned you, hasn't he?"

Zane felt winded. There had to be some way out of this. Surely, he couldn't just disappear. _Somebody_ would notice, wouldn't they?

"My friends—"

"You haven't got any friends," Sylvia sneered. "You told me so yourself the other day, remember?"

"If you mean Rikki," Denman added, "Let me make something very clear to you. You are her surety. If you aren't here, I go after her. If you somehow manage to get away from us, I will not wait. I will take her in immediately. We've got eyes on her."

Zane stared. She knew, then. She hadn't been bluffing.

"Now," Denman continued. "We're going to finish our preliminary examination and then you can dry off and take some time to yourself. We've got a few phone calls to make, loose ends to tie up… But I want you nice and calm before we get to that."

The hand was gone and he could breathe freely again, but he found himself taking lots of shallow breaths, as if the air had gone out of the room. His arms were still being restrained and as he lay there, he could feel more hands on his body, prodding at his waist.

There were also clicks and he looked off to one side, with even more horror, at the large camera that was pointed at him. Denman was directing the photographer, pointing at parts of his body that she wanted photographed specifically. Zane's face was on fire, as he realised, beyond the horror of exposure, just how humiliating this experience was. There was nothing between him and their hands and their eyes. And the way they looked at him was wolfish and cruel – he realised with anguish that they didn't see him as a person.

He shut his eyes, trying to block out what was happening. It was too much to withstand and he wanted, more than anything, for it to stop. Then he felt a yank where his shin would have been, and horrible pain, as though his toenail had been torn off. He screamed and kicked out. He opened his eyes to see Sylvia standing at the base of the tail, holding something shining with forceps. A scale. Small beads of red blood were gathered at the base and there was a dreadful ache where it had obviously been torn away.

"That's enough for today," he heard Denman say, and she looked meaningfully at Sylvia, who looked once at Zane's face, then rolled her eyes and nodded.

"Can you change back?" Denman asked him. Zane's heart stuttered – could he?

"I need to be dry," he mumbled faintly. "I think."

Denman nodded to one of the men standing next to her, who brought over a large towel and began to run it over Zane's prone body. Zane shut his eyes again and held them tightly closed. It was all too much – the shame, the horror, the absolute foreignness of everything happening to a body that didn't feel like it was his anymore. It didn't take too long for him to feel the strange sensation of changing and he opened his eyes to find that he once again had legs, and once again was clothed.

"Incredible," said Paul. "Absolutely incredible."

Denman smirked at him, then began to undo the straps that held him down on the table. Once they were free, she gestured towards a door – the room he had run from earlier. He swung his legs down from the table, hesitating the entire way, still waiting for something else horrible to happen. May as well pile it on now.

"Go on, have a rest, we'll be back to speak with you once you've slept properly," Denman said, walking towards the door and holding it open.

Zane looked at it warily and cast a glance around the room. Aside from Denman and Sylvia, who was staring intently at the scale she held with the forceps and occasionally glancing his way, there were three men – Paul and two figures who looked more like bouncers than scientists. He vaguely recognised one as James, the one who had appeared from nowhere to push him into the pool.

Denman seemed to follow his thoughts as she watched his eyes rove around the space, looking for the door.

"We're underground," she said. "Maybe if you're good, we'll take you outside for some sunshine in a few weeks. For now, you're staying with us."

Zane hung his head and walked slowly towards the open door. He could see there was a lock on the outside – once he was in, there'd be no getting out.

As he walked inside, he felt a last desperate urge to run. He didn't know where he'd go or how he'd get past five assailants, two of them men twice his size. He just knew that every instinct he had was screaming at him to _get out_ while he still could. Maybe, just maybe…

"Remember, Zane," Denman said, putting her small hand on his shoulder as he came within reach, "Rikki is my second choice, but I'll be happy enough with my second choice."

Zane's heart sank, as visions of himself fleeing and escaping were gone. Her threat towards Rikki was real enough, and while he might get away, he wouldn't be able to get there in time to warn her, if she really did have somebody close. He didn't even know where he was.

"Sweet dreams," Denman said, smiling sweetly as she closed the door with a definitive_ clink_ that signalled a lock falling into place.

Zane walked over to sit on the cot against the far wall of the room and, wincing, raised his jeans on his right leg. There, halfway up his shin, he could see a scar, though he was surprised that while it still ached, it was no longer the sharp pain he had initially experienced. It was as though it had healed over as he had changed.

Bringing the fabric back down, he curled up halfway across the cot, buried his face in the thin pillow that had been left there and silently cried.

A/N: Dun dun DUNNNN – hope you're enjoying it, leave me a couple words to say so if you are


	6. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

_Six years later_

"She's in danger, Cleo. She's in so much danger, and I can't save her on my own."

Whatever Cleo had been expecting that day, it hadn't been the sight that confronted her. She had known Zane Bennett for most of her life. She had endured his taunts and, eventually, when he became a more decent human being, she had tolerated his presence. She had even welcomed it, because he made her friend happy. But Zane, in all his iterations, had never been a shrinking violet. Seeing him like this frightened her.

"What kind of danger, Zane?" she asked, before mentally kicking herself. He was clearly in a state and she should try to de-escalate first before she questioned him on a very touchy subject. She motioned him to sit and she sat down next to Lewis, who was, she realised, also looking very peaky.

He waved her off and continued to stand.

"It's… it's not Denman, but somebody who used to work with her," he said.

"Denman told somebody about us?" Cleo replied, trying to process what she was hearing.

"Yes."

Cleo had expected explanations, or apologies, maybe even some broader context. All she got was a monosyllable that confirmed something that could truly shatter her life. And Rikki's. And Emma's. Maybe even Bella's. Typical Zane, to think only about the person he cared about, only the person he knew.

"If that's the case, then this other person could be after any of us," Cleo replied angrily. "I appreciate that you only ever cared about Rikki, but you do realise that all of us are mermaids and therefore all of us could be in danger?"

"No," he said with another infuriating monosyllable, though at least this time he tried to explain himself. "Sylvia will only go after Rikki. She's been watching her for years and she has an easy way to get to her without raising wider suspicion."

"What are you talking about?" Cleo replied, now utterly confused. Who was Sylvia?

"This person doesn't want to expose mermaids," Lewis said, looking up nervously at Zane, who was finally looking up from the floor and staring daggers at Lewis. "Apparently, they need… supplies."

Cleo didn't know what she expected to hear but it certainly wasn't that. Supplies? What did that even mean?

"They got hold of someone… someone like you," Zane started. He was looking at the ground again. "They harvested them. Scales, blood, hair, skin."

Lewis' shell-shocked expression was starting to make sense as Cleo stared at Zane with horror.

"Harvested?" she squeaked. "You're telling me that Denman and her cronies found a mermaid and killed her for spare parts?!"

"No," Zane said, as calmly as he could muster. "They didn't kill anyone, they just…" He trailed off, looking away again. "They collected what they needed and kept them alive."

Cleo felt her blood run cold. She had often imagined the nightmare that might come of exposure and capture. Lewis had warned her often enough and she occasionally woke up with a cry from a dream where she had been imprisoned in a tank or examined by a scientist holding a scalpel. The dream usually dissipated quickly enough and Lewis was there to reassure her that she was safe, but here was Zane, standing there and telling them that it had really happened to someone.

"Where is she now?" Cleo murmured.

"Melbourne. For now. But wherever Rikki will be, especially if she's on her own, she'll show up soon enough," Zane replied. He finally moved towards a chair, and sat down with a grimace. He continued his staring contest with the ground.

"What?" Cleo asked, confused.

"Sylvia will be—"

"Who's Sylvia?" Cleo exclaimed. "I was asking about the mermaid that they kidnapped! Is she hurt? Is she still alive?"

Lewis placed a hand over hers and gave it a quick squeeze. She could see, at a glance, that Lewis didn't want her to start down this road, but she couldn't resist. She needed to know."

"Start with a name," Cleo said. "If you know her name."

Zane didn't raise his eyes from the ground and, pale as he had been when Cleo had walked into the room, his face was now completely bloodless.

"I don't know," he mumbled, and Cleo had to lean in to hear what he said. "I… I got out and I…"

"You got her out?" Cleo asked. "You helped her escape?"

Zane did look up then, a look of relief on his face.

"Yes."

As he returned to the monosyllabic answers, Cleo felt herself getting frustrated again, but she was also starting to realise that something traumatic had happened to Zane and pushing him right now was not going to get them anywhere.

"What about Denman?" she asked gently. "Is she still…?"

Zane met her eyes and nodded briskly.

"She's alive," he said, softly. "But… she's… there was an accident and—"

He didn't look away from Cleo as he spoke and she was disturbed to see the hatred that flared up in his eyes as he spoke. Something told her that if she looked into where Denman was, she wasn't going to like the answer.

"Denman's not a threat," Zane finished, his words a bit louder, and then he looked to Lewis.

"Please. Rikki."

"We can call her," Lewis started to say, slowly, but Cleo shot him a glance.

"If this is about getting her to quit her idiotic 'job'," she said, "Then I don't think we'll have much success. She hasn't listened to any of us and—"

"I told him that," Lewis said, slightly exasperated. "But he insists. He thinks she'll take us seriously."

"Have you tried to call her?" Cleo asked Zane.

He shook his head without raising it. Cleo took a moment to really examine Zane. He was so different to the carefree, arrogant boy she had grown up with, the bully that had tormented her and then the friend that had protected her. His hair had grown out and fell almost to his shoulders. The deep auburn colour was now liberally sprinkled with grey - almost white - hairs. It looked like he had attempted to cut it on his own - the ends were uneven and you could see where an inexpert hand had cut some chunks shorter than others. His shoulders had broadened since she had last seen him and he did look a good deal bulkier, but his face was so thin and there were hollows in his cheeks and dark circles around his eyes. It was only then that Cleo started to inspect his hands and saw the many scars that littered them, and how his right hand shook slightly.

"If you haven't tried to call her, how can you know she won't listen to what you have to say?" Cleo asked, in what she hoped was a gentle tone. "What's really going on?"

Zane looked up at Lewis then, a slightly desperate expression on his face. Lewis was biting the inside of his cheek, a nervous habit he had that only surfaced in times of extreme stress.

"What aren't you two telling me?" Cleo asked, looking between them. "What could be worse than some poor girl being tortured by Denman and her friends?"

"I went to Sylvia when I found out she was going to try to go after Rikki," he said, through gritted teeth. "I… I threatened her, told her to stay away from all of you."

Cleo waited for him to continue.

"She told me that her primary investor wanted results," Zane said, and of all the emotions that Zane had displayed in the last 20 minutes, this was by far the worst. Abject misery. "My father. My father's been paying for all of it, and he needs more material so he can keep the money rolling in."

Cleo found that she had nothing to say. Certainly, Cleo, Rikki and everyone knew that the relationship between Harrison and his son had always been strained, even after the incident out at Mako with Denman. Maybe especially after that. But even Rikki might not believe any of Zane's warnings if she knew that his own father had profited from the imprisonment and torture of a mermaid.

"Did any of that money come to you?" she asked, her mouth dry.

Zane shook his head, and again said nothing.

"But you're worried that Rikki won't believe that," Cleo continued. "I mean, why should she? Why should I believe you? You called her," she suddenly remembered. "You told her you were going to work for Denman!"

"I didn't want to," he said, his voice sounding truly strained. "I did it so I could stay close to what she was doing, to protect you—"

Cleo scoffed.

"Protect us by teaming up with Denman to kidnap someone? As long as it wasn't your precious Rikki, who cares who got hurt, right?"

Cleo was surprised by the anger she felt rising up inside of her. So many years had passed, and they were well past their highly emotional teenage years, yet the memory of Zane's many betrayals were bringing up some very nasty feelings. And then there was the question of what Zane had just said, about knowing that this Sylvia person was going to go after Rikki.

"How did you find out that she was going to go after Rikki? How did you happen to come across this information unless you—"

"Cleo, stop it!" Lewis interrupted her, startling her with his outburst. "It's not Zane's fault, ok? Just… just trust me. He's not the bad guy. He's not."

He looked up at Zane then, and said, in a pleading tone, "She needs to know."

"What do I need to know?" Cleo asked, suspiciously glancing between the two men.

Zane shook his head, still infuriatingly refusing to raise his head or engage.

"I'll deal with it myself," he muttered, starting to get up from his seat. "I shouldn't have come."

To Cleo's surprise, Lewis jumped up from his seat and moved towards Zane, who was walking towards the corridor that led to their front door. She was further surprised, unpleasantly so, as she realised that Zane had a pronounced limp.

She watched as Lewis grabbed Zane's shoulder, and whispered something that she couldn't quite understand. Zane shook off Lewis' hand and kept moving towards the door.

"Tell her whatever you want. It doesn't matter," he called out behind him, and walked out of Cleo's sightline. She heard the door slam, and then watched Lewis come back into the room. She had never seen him like this, his eyes wide and wild.

"It was him, Cleo," he said, sinking down onto the floor and burying his face in his hands. "It was him."

"What do you mean?" Cleo asked, moving towards Lewis and gingerly putting her arm around him, to comfort him. It was a horrifying thought that someone had been subjected to Denman's experiments, but she didn't understand why learning about what happened to a stranger would have rattled Lewis quite so much. It had to be a stranger. After all, she was fine. So were Bella, Emma and Rikki, the only other mermaids they knew.

"Denman's experiment," Lewis said through his hands. "Zane was her experiment."

Lewis's response made her feel like she'd swallowed poison as the images of Zane's battered body flooded her mind. She had refused to see what was right in front of her.

"A-are you sure?" she asked. She wanted to believe it couldn't be true, but even as she said it, she saw the way Zane had staggered out of the room, how his hand shook. The marks on his wrists that just peeked out from his sleeves, which she had taken for shadows. Who wore long sleeves in Australia in December?

"I'm sure," Lewis said miserably.

"Then we need to go after him," Cleo said, starting to get up from the floor and pulling Lewis up along with her. "He can't have gone far."

Lewis followed her, but he didn't exactly speed up and as they walked to the front door, Cleo realised that she hadn't seen a car in front of the house. So either Zane had limped all the way here, or…

She and Lewis looked out at the waves that lapped a few feet from their front garden. Even though he had only walked out of the house a few minutes ago, there was no sign of Zane.

"Would he go to Mako?" she asked anxiously, preparing to jump into the water and chase him. She tried not to think about what she might see - what would Zane look like in the water, as a…?

"No," Lewis shook his head. "He hates the place, he wouldn't go there."

"Then where?" Cleo asked, a little desperately. "He must be staying somewhere? Maybe somewhere in town? I can't just go searching the whole ocean for him."

"I think he'll go to find Sylvia," Lewis said sadly. "To make sure she doesn't go after Rikki."

Cleo shook her head.

"That doesn't make any sense," she said. "If he was going to do that, why come to us for help to persuade Rikki? He said he went to her already and threatened her. He said it didn't work!"

"She called his bluff," Lewis said. "He threatened to do to her what he did to Denman."

Cleo's stomach flipped.

"What did he do to Denman? I thought he said that she's still—"

"She's in a long-term care facility in Victoria. She's got something called Locked-In Syndrome. It can happen when someone has a stroke."

"I don't understand," Cleo said, searching Lewis' face. "If Denman had a stroke, what does Zane have to do with it?"

"He gave her a stroke," Lewis said. "Literally. It was how he managed to escape and how he's stayed out of their hands so far."

"But how—"

"He can do what you can do with water, Cleo, and a few other things, too. Blood is mostly water and he… He said he can't remember how to do it, exactly, and he would never want to do it again. He told me what happened to Denman was almost an accident, and he was pretty out of it when he escaped."

"He came to us," Cleo said, feeling the weight of the world settle around her. "He came to us because he didn't want to hurt anyone again. Even someone who had hurt him."

"Yeah," Lewis said, with a sigh. "He said Sylvia didn't believe him, and he couldn't bring himself to do it. I think she's going after Rikki to punish Zane, not just because Rikki is an easier target, with her undersea exploring. Why else go to the trouble, if she could just do what they did to Zane to someone else?"

"You mean that Denman and this Sylvia person _changed_ Zane? By force, somehow?"

"How else do you think it happened?" Lewis countered. "He didn't jump into the moon pool by choice."

"It's too much," Cleo whispered. Her throat was dry and she just wanted to cry. She had been imagining a stranger, penned up in a tank, banging her fists against the glass. But a faceless stranger in an imaginary cage was one thing. A very real, very injured Zane, who she had known for most of her young life, was quite another.

She and Lewis stood looking out at the water in silence. There didn't seem to be anything to say.

"He's not stable," Lewis said, after a while. "I think… I think whatever he's about to do, it'll make him worse. I think that the fact he came to us was his cry for help. They had him for years. He didn't tell me everything they did, but what he did tell me… I'll never sleep well again."

"Why didn't you just tell me?" Cleo asked miserably. "If I had known, I wouldn't have said those things. I'd actually have tried to help."

"He asked me not to tell you," Lewis said. "I should have just—But I didn't. I regret it."

"It's not your fault," Cleo said brusquely. "I should have at least tried to listen. I was too busy replaying hurt feelings from years ago."

She shook her head.

"What can we do now?"

"Hope that he comes back, I guess."

"That's not good enough," Cleo declared. "Do you think, if he's gone to find this Sylvia woman, that he'll… that he might kill her?"

Lewis just nodded.

"And you think if he does that, it'll break him."

"He's already pretty broken," Lewis said. "You didn't see him when he first showed up. I thought that—"

"We can talk about it later," Cleo declared. "We have work to do. We need to find Sylvia before he does. And we need to talk to Rikki."


	7. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Rikki stepped back from the balcony and went inside to grab her coffee. The day had gone well. She was even starting to enjoy the endless interviews. Clearly, she was a hot commodity. Billed as something between a tech genius and an eccentric explorer, the reporters enjoyed talking about her as though she were a minor celebrity. The questions about her personal life were particularly frustrating.

She raised the porcelain cup to her lips and carefully sipped. She had never been graceful as a kid - her earliest memories were of cuts and bruises and scrapes from sudden, jerky movements. There was nothing charming about her clumsiness and she knew so much of it was down to her own impatience. But she had grown far more careful and her default was now slow, careful movements. She didn't worry anymore about accidental spills out in public.

As she set the cup down on the little table, she reflected on how far she had come and how being a mermaid had taken her to unimaginable heights. She hadn't worried about money in years, and her actual underwater exploration was pretty restricted, only a few weeks each year of secretive trips out on the tiny sailboat she had learned to sail on her own. It was registered in a different name, so she could convincingly play the part of secretive inventor and make evasive comments about her world-first diving tech. Nobody pushed too far, usually, and if they did, she simply left the interview. The book she was working on was perfectly low on details of how she did her work and focused instead on the history of the objects she had found. This suited her perfectly.

Of course, there would always be naysayers. Her old friends, whom she hadn't seen in years, had taken the time to occasionally call her or, once, Bella had even come to see her in person when she was travelling through Singapore. It was always the same song - she was taking a risk, being in the public eye was dangerous, she was being selfish. The last of these conversations, with a frustrated Emma, six months ago, had ended with her swearing not to take calls or meetings with her friends ever again. She didn't need anybody else - not her former friends, and especially not any romantic entanglements. There hadn't been anybody else since Zane, of course. At least not beyond a cursory first date, all of which ended with her backing away, fearful of what more than one date might bring. She had realised she could never let anyone in again. Zane has been a girl's mistake and she was a woman now.

A woman with a career and a gorgeous suite in a beautiful hotel, in one of Australia's finest cities. There were times she couldn't quite believe her luck. There were other times, of course, of crippling loneliness and sorrow for what she had given up. But there were fewer bad days than good, on the whole.

Rikki was about to pick up her cup again when her mobile rang. As was her habit, she failed to check who was calling before answering and mentally cursed herself when she heard Cleo's voice.

"Don't hang up!" Cleo said frantically. Apparently Emma had shared their conversation from a few months ago and just how well it ended.

"What do you want?" Rikki said, resigned to at least starting a conversation. It was just a little too immature to hang up.

She could hear Cleo let out a sigh of relief that the conversation was continuing.

"I can't tell you everything over the phone," Cleo said. "But I need you to hear me out and just… please just don't ignore me."

"Get on with it, Cleo," Rikki said, feeling slightly unnerved by apprehension about whatever was going to come out of her friend's mouth next. It was probably going to be the same lecture and she didn't foresee the next few minutes going well.

"Zane came to see us," Cleo said.

Rikki hadn't heard his name in so long, and hearing it now almost made her dizzy. Zane was alive. Well, she had assumed that would have been the case. Zane had gone to see Cleo and Lewis. Zane had not come to her.

"Rikki, are you still there?" Cleo asked.

"Y-yeah," Rikki stuttered. "What did he want?"

Cleo didn't speak right away and Rikki felt her anxiety rising. The last time they had discussed Zane, shortly after she had spoken to him for the last time, Cleo completely supported her decision to cut ties. She had agreed that Zane was manipulative and might want to use Rikki's feelings for him against her. Cleo had long since stopped being a gullible innocent. So if she was anxious, that meant something had convinced her to trust him. It couldn't be good.

"Rikki, he's in trouble," she said softly. "It's not simple, but—"

"Is he with you now?" Rikki demanded.

"No, he left about an hour ago. But we think we know where he's going to be and we need to find him."

"Find him?" Rikki asked. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"He's not ok, Rikki," Cleo said quietly. "I can't say more, but I need you to trust me. We need to help him. Where are you right now?"

Rikki sat down and stared at her now-cold cup of coffee.

"Melbourne," she said. "I've been promoting the new book."

"Melbourne!" Cleo exclaimed. "But Zane said that—"

"What did he say? Has he been following me?"

Rikki interpreted the uncomfortable silence on the other end of the line as a 'yes'. Just perfect. Not only was her ex-boyfriend, whom she had tried very hard to forget after all this time, somehow back in her life, but he had also been stalking her.

"Rikki, we'll explain everything when we get there. For now, please just stay where you are and stay away from… you know…"

"Stay away from… what?" Rikki said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "Stay away from my crazy ex?"

"No, Rikki," Cleo said, and Rikki was surprised to hear a tone of actual anger in her friend's voice. "You know what I mean. Just stay put - which hotel are you staying in?"

Rikki was starting to get nervous. It wasn't like Cleo to sound so on edge, and she was talking as if she might be in real trouble. Surely, the usual lecture about how irresponsible she was doing deep sea diving so close to the public eye wouldn't warrant this level of panic.

"I'm at the Royce," she admitted, before mentally kicking herself. She didn't need to be dealing with this.

"Ok. Ok. Stay put, we'll be there tomorrow."

"Cleo," Rikki burst out, "This is nuts. You can't just tell me to stay indoors until Mum and Dad get here to - what - save me from Zane Bennett?"

"No, that's not what's happening," Cleo said, sounding even more frustrated. "Just please. Please be careful, be alert. I'll tell you everything when we get there. We got the earliest flight we could."

Rikki didn't wait for any more instructions. She hung up and stared at the wall. Her perfectly calm coffee moment was gone. She had never been one to take instruction well, and the rebellious teenager that had never really disappeared was ready to go out on the town, preferably on a boat, until she remembered that this was Melbourne and no matter how many risks she might be willing to take, it was looking like rain. She huffed and stared out the window.

What was this about? Was it really something to do with Zane? My God, that was a name she hadn't heard in a long time.

About two years ago, after a bottle of wine consumed entirely alone (which came after yet another failed first date), she had decided to look Zane up. She had not found a single trace of him - he was a digital ghost. That had startled her enough, and she had even done a more thorough search when she got up the next day, through a hung over haze. Nothing turned up. His father's name was in a few different articles, but nothing about Zane. She had shrugged it off at the time. He had always had his quirks and his way of rebelling - maybe avoiding social media was just one of those things. That, or he was now so wealthy doing something dodgy that a social media presence was not appropriate. It was the last time that she had bothered to look into him, although she still thought of him often.

She had protested, whenever her relationship status came up in conversation, that she just wasn't interested in seeing anyone. She was focusing on herself right now. And that was certainly true, at least in part. But of course, another part of the truth was that she was still pining for her first relationship. She had never expected to feel this way, certainly not after that final breakup when Zane had demonstrated he couldn't be trusted. He had broken her heart and the most terrible aspect was that she would never stop loving him. In spite of everything, she knew that if she ever saw him again, she wouldn't just be capable of ignoring him. So this news that he had resurfaced out of nowhere was less than welcome, because she now had to think about what that might mean for her emotional state.

Rikki had momentarily considered listening to what Cleo had told her. She wasn't stupid, whatever the others might think. She knew that there was always going to be a risk of exposure. If there was a chance that they had learned about something, then of course she'd listen. But she also knew, from the little that Cleo had told her, that in this case, it was somehow Zane who was in trouble. And while she might sympathise, it didn't mean that she needed to lock herself up. Unless of course they thought that Zane might try to hurt her, but that was ridiculous on multiple fronts. First of all, Rikki was confident that Zane would never truly do something to harm her directly. It wasn't in him. And secondly, even if he tried, of the two of them, she was the one with superpowers. He wouldn't get the chance.

With these justifications set in her mind, she made her way down to the hotel lobby bar and settled herself at an empty banquette. It was still early afternoon, and the crowd was thin. The bar was also far enough from the main hotel lobby that she could expect to be reasonably isolated. No reason to take unnecessary risks. She looked around at the beautiful interiors as the waiter brought her a glass of red and once again marvelled that she was able to stay here. After all these years of luxury and being treated with all the pomp of minor celebrity, she still had moments of dazed happiness where she could appreciate the things she had worked so hard to earn. Even if there was nobody else to appreciate them at her side. Well, that was just the way her life had turned out.

"Drinking alone at 4 in the afternoon?"

The woman's voice broke in on Rikki's inner monologue and she looked up, annoyed. The stranger was a pretty brunette about Rikki's age who wore her hair in a neat, closely-cropped bob and whose face was covered in an extra layer of unnecessary makeup. Rikki frowned at the intruder.

"Don't really need company," Rikki said, trying to suppress her annoyance. She wanted to be alone at the moment. Surely everything from her body language to the fact that she had chosen a spot at the back of the bar area signalled that clearly enough.

"Mind if I join you anyway?" the brunette insisted, smiling. "Otherwise, I'll be drinking alone at 4, too, and I'm reasonably certain the bartender won't like the look of two isolated women drinking a sad glass of wine seated a few feet from each other."

"I don't care what the bartender likes," Rikki said, allowing some of her annoyance into her voice. She looked up to give the woman a glare and then huffed, and abandoned her glass of wine as she began to get up from her seat.

"Wait, wait!" the woman said, suddenly turning off the fake smile. "I'm sorry, I just didn't want to come across like… well, I'm sorry, anyway. I recognised you from the book!"

Rikki stopped what she was doing and looked up. The smile the woman gave her seemed genuine (and embarrassed) enough. It was entirely possible that she was, in fact, just somebody who had spotted Rikki and worked up the courage to come over and talk.

"Why not?" Rikki thought to herself. "I could use the company, I guess."

"It's fine," Rikki said, sitting down again and nodding towards the other end of the banquette. "I don't have to be anywhere for an hour or so."

"That's great!" the brunette gushed, grinning. "Awesome to meet you. I'm Sylvia." She extended a hand towards Rikki and they shook briefly.

"I've been following your adventures for a while now," she said, enthusiastically, raising her own glass of wine to her lips.

"That's great," Rikki said. "Do you… do you do any diving yourself?"

"No," Sylvia admitted. "To be honest, I'm kind of terrified of the ocean. I can just about get away with wading in up to my knees."

"Well, fair enough," Rikki said, warming up a little. "I suppose you don't have as much of a beach culture where you're from? Somewhere in the UK, I guess."

"Yeah, I'm from Surrey," Sylvia said. "I've been here for the last six years or so, though."

"In Melbourne?" Rikki asked politely.

"No, in Australia, but here and there," Sylvia said, staring into her wine glass. "I'm in medical research, so my job's taken me to all kinds of places."

"Wow," Rikki said. "That sounds important. You experiment on mice and stuff?"

"No, nothing so exciting," Sylvia admitted. "I'm mostly in sales and procurement. But it's important work. We develop cancer treatments."

"That's pretty important," Rikki admitted. "Kind of puts what I do back. Nobody actually needs the stuff I find."

"Oh, you'd be surprised how important your work is to people," Sylvia said, her face split into her broadest smile yet. Rikki was wondering how she could smile like that without her face cramping up. Then again, she had told her she was in sales. Rikki was never going to be successful in sales.

"Let me get you another drink?" Sylvia offered, and Rikki realised that she had already finished her glass of wine. She usually liked to savour it, but then again, she usually drank alone, her mind either one other subjects or idly scanning her mobile. Drinking in company had a different rhythm.

"Sure, thanks," she accepted, and Sylvia called the waiter over. She handed him a fancy-looking credit card and Rikki smiled to herself. She did enjoy being treated and, in this case at least, it didn't seem to come with any strings attached or expectations.

"Bring me something nice, another red," Rikki said with a grin, and Sylvia matched her smile.

"May as well, I'm here on a business trip," Sylvia confided. "I'll just expense it."

Rikki raised her glass to that.

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IRikki realised that she was no longer sitting down at the banquette. She and Sylvia had been drinking for a little while, pausing for a bit of food, and she realised that she was now being pushed to her feet.

"Come on, Rikki, let's go," Sylvia was saying, though through Rikki's haze it all sounded tinny and far away. It felt like she was in a dream.

"Come on," Sylvia said again. "Let's get you home."

"I'm staying in this hotel," Rikki mumbled, but she realised that her words weren't coming out quite as she expected them to. She stared at the table of the banquette, wondering just how many drinks she had had. She could only see one half-empty wine glass, though her vision had doubled.

"You'll be just fine," Sylvia reassured her, in response to her muttering.

Rikki allowed Sylvia to lead her out of the hotel bar, stumbling along as best she could on her heels. She wondered idly how Sylvia knew what room she was staying in. Had she mentioned it? Before she could speak up and say something, Rikki realised that she was walking through the front doors of the hotel and a car had pulled up. Sylvia gestured to the driver to open the door.

"Where are we going?" Rikki asked, somewhat curious, definitely still dazed. It was only just starting to get dark. It came out as a muddled whisper.

"She's had a few too many," Sylvia said to the driver with a smile.

"Night's over before it began, eh?" he said, answering her smile and helping her place Rikki into the car.

"Just going to get her home," Sylvia replied. "Thanks."

Rikki was trying to sit up in the car and reach for the door, but her stiff limbs wouldn't quite obey her. She felt utterly dazed, and tried to voice her protest at being taken somewhere without actually knowing where or why, but it came out as a mumbled response anyway.

"I know, love, we're just going to get you home and to bed, OK?" Sylvia said, a little bit too loudly into Rikki's sensitive ears. Rikki winced but allowed herself to relax back into the seat. Home and bed both sounded pretty good. She hadn't been home in a while. This would be nice. Maybe her dad would be there this time. She slowly drifted off and couldn't remember why she was trying so hard to stay awake anyway.

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"—are you seriously tempting fate? Do you know what's going to happen if he finds us?"

"I want him to find us. I told you, he's not actually going to do anything. This way we make sure he stays away for good."

The man's and woman's voices pierced Rikki's consciousness like a knife and she jolted awake. She had a terrible headache and everything still felt a bit woolly, but she managed to open her eyes. She was sitting in twilight inside a large glass tub. Her arms were behind her back and she could feel something binding them. She realised that there was something in her mouth. A gag. She tried to cry out but it came out like a muffled gurgle.

The glass tub, she realised with growing horror, was half-filled with water, and she was currently bound and gagged with her tail on display.

She renewed her sounds of consternation, which drew the attention of the people who had woken her up.

"She's awake," the woman's voice came first and it was immediately familiar to Rikki as the voice of her drinking companion from that afternoon, Sylvia.

"Great," the man replied, though he didn't sound enthusiastic.

Rikki winced as the lights were switched on in the room and she realised she was in a medium-sized office. One wall - Rikki realised it must have been a window - was covered floor-to-ceiling in blinds, while the rest of the room was empty apart from a table with a few items that Rikki did not immediately recognise scattered across it.

Rikki attempted to speak again, knowing it was in vain, but focusing all her rage on the two people standing over her, surveying her body like she was a fine cut of steak. Meanwhile, she was gently moving her wrists behind her to see if she could loosen her bonds. She was more than a little frustrated when she felt hard plastic cutting into her wrists.

"Was the gag necessary?" the man asked, with some asperity.

"It's all necessary," Sylvia said. "We're not taking any risks."

"Risks like the breadcrumbs you sprinkled?"

"That's our insurance, not a risk."

There was a sound like a soft alarm from the man's pocket and Rikki tried to focus on memorising the man's face. Sylvia's face was pretty well etched in her mind at this point. She'd never forget it.

"Well, someone's coming," the man said, frowning at his mobile. "I think it might be two people."

"Perfect," Sylvia said. "Chances are good there's another one."

Two people. The implications slammed into Rikki's head. Cleo and Lewis were supposed to be coming here and they had told her to stay put. She had been reckless and now she was trapped. And meanwhile, if it really was Cleo, then she was walking into a trap. She renewed her attempts to shout, to make noise - anything to alert whoever might be coming that they shouldn't continue. Because if it was Cleo, then... she didn't want to think about it. The man knelt down close to her as she thrashed more fiercely in the half-filled tub.

"Please calm down," he said. "Don't make this more unpleasant than it needs to be. We don't want to hurt you."

Rikki shot a look at Sylvia, who rolled her eyes at those words.

"Stop trying to talk to it," she said.

It. Rikki winced internally. This was bad. There were only two of them, but they had managed to incapacitate her pretty thoroughly. With her hands tied up behind her, she couldn't manage to use her power. And even if she did, what would she do? Set fire to the room? Set fire to her captors?

"Go roll out the welcome mat," Sylvia said, bending down towards Rikki and pulling out something long and thin - a syringe - from her pocket. Before Rikki could move away, she felt a needle prick her skin at the nick and something was pushed through into her veins. Sylvia said nothing, got up, and placed the syringe on the table. She then walked out and closed the door. If she hadn't been panicking before, Rikki began to panic in earnest. Had she just been injected with a sedative? She didn't feel drowsy, so that didn't seem likely. Maybe it didn't work right away? If it wasn't a sedative, what could it be? The uncertainty - the total absence of what was going on - truly chilled her heart. She had expected an explanation of some kind. She had expected someone to give her demands or tell her what they wanted. But apart from the man's assurance that they didn't want to hurt her - which she wouldn't have believed even if she didn't see Sylvia roll her eyes - she had had no information of any kind. The man was afraid of someone, but Sylvia wasn't.

Rikki's thoughts were pierced by the sound of falling water, like sprinklers or a shower, and then the sound of familiar voices shouting - Cleo and Lewis. She felt as though her heart stopped.

Rikki attempted, yet again, to move her wrists free of the restraints, but the plastic only bit in harder. She could see water start to trickle in under the door and she put two and two together. Cleo had been ambushed by some sort of indoor sprinkler setup. At least she could still use her powers. Rikki groaned in frustration as she tried, for the fifth time, to use her own power to evaporate the water around her. It wasn't happening. Meanwhile, she knew something had been injected into her veins and was making its way through her bloodstream. The question was, what was it? She still didn't feel any effects. Maybe it was just a placebo, something to frighten her.

Even as she thought that, though, she realised that something was happening. Her body was starting to ache, a deep and persistent pain that had probably started a short while ago but was now making itself felt. She stared wildly around her. Was it poison? Had Sylvia's goal been to kill her? Her heart beat wildly and the pain intensified. It was still bearable, but becoming stronger. A woman's scream cut through the growing ache and she swivelled her head towards the door. It had been Cleo.

She renewed her struggles to get free. At the very least, she needed to get out of this tub. Her movements, however, were hindered, mostly by the pain that she was experiencing all over her skin as she tried to get loose. She moaned and then looked up, startled, as the door opened and she saw him. He stood tall, wearing dark jeans and, oddly, a dark turtleneck jumper. His face was drawn and pale.

Zane's face searched the room and rapidly landed on her. He moved towards her, but first he grabbed hold of a pair of scissors from the table. Rikki followed his movements and saw that something shiny and gold was on that table - a ponytail of her hair, tied up with an elastic band at the top. He ignored it and moved towards her with the scissors. She tried to turn around to present her wrists but moaned again, as her skin was starting to hurt more than she could tolerate. A feverish feeling overcame her, and then she heard Cleo's voice.

"She said she poisoned her!" she was saying. "We need to find the antidote. She hasn't got it on her. Zane, please!"

Rikki felt hands on her arms and she jerked away, the pain starting to grow. Then, there was a swift movement and her wrists were free. Then, the gag was removed and she began to cough violently, every shake of her body making her feel the ever-sharper pain on her skin and in her muscles. She saw Zane lean down towards her and hissed at the sensation of his hands on her body, which increasingly felt like she was being stabbed by tiny needles everywhere. He picked her up and, in spite of the pain, she rolled into his body, seeking any kind of comfort possible. She could hear Cleo and Lewis speaking in the background, but she couldn't make out the words.

Zane only carried her a little way out of the room and set her down on the floor, eliciting another moan from her. She was still soaked, and her tail stuck to the floor beneath her. Whatever Sylvia had injected into her was really taking effect now, though she wasn't thinking straight about much of anything. She just wanted the pain to stop.

"I'm sorry," she heard Zane's voice, deeper than she was used to. Her eyes were closed shut, but she squinted up at him. He looked quite pained, too.

"Zane! We can't find it!" Cleo's voice was entirely hysterical. Lewis said something unclear.

"I know this stuff. This might hurt," Zane whispered to Rikki, and it was the last thing she was aware of as he placed his hand on her neck and the burning feeling intensified.

A/N: I hope people are finding the story, if not enjoyable, at least compelling! Not the lighthearted fare we'd expect with the source material, but then again, I'm not the right demographic for that anyway. I just like a mermaid story. Do leave your thoughts.

I've got the rest of the story planned out, so barring any major issues, I'll be finishing this one in the next few months.


	8. Chapter 7

Chapter 7

"We got bumped up to a flight for this evening," Lewis announced to Cleo, putting his mobile back in his pocket. He saw that she was sitting sadly, staring at something on her own mobile. Walking over, he realised it was a photograph of Rikki's eighteenth birthday, when they had all celebrated together at the moon pool out at Mako. The only person not in the photo was Lewis - he had taken it. In the picture, the girls were all grinning cheerfully, none more broadly than Rikki, holding up the new mobile she had just gotten as a gift, with a gently smiling Zane next to her. His arm was around her shoulders and they looked utterly carefree. Of course, earlier that day, Rikki had been kidnapped and almost died in a fiery inferno. Pictures could be deceptive.

"Did you hear?" Lewis tried again to break through her haze of misery. "Flight leaves in two hours, we'd better get going."

Cleo turned her face towards him and smiled wanly.

"Thanks for arranging that," she said.

"You can thank my brother," Lewis replied, giving her a weak smile in return.

He paused, before asking the question. It was so massive, there were so many things to discuss.

"What do you think will happen when we get there?"

Cleo looked back towards her mobile and started flicking through the photos again.

"I have no idea," she said, subdued. "I hope Rikki listens to us. I hope this person waits before she tries anything. I hope Zane doesn't... I hope we find Zane and he listens to us."

She went back to her photos and Lewis spotted a picture of him and Zane sitting on the beach, engaged in a heated discussion while Rikki sat nearby making an annoyed face at the camera. A ghost of a smile crossed his lips, but it instantly disappeared with Cleo's words.

"What happened to us?" she asked. "We all used to be so close. It was all so different."

"We grew up," Lewis said, hoping it sounded understanding and gentle. "We went down different paths. We're still friends, Cleo."

"Even Zane?"

Lewis took his time with his answer. He looked at the photo again and then looked at Cleo.

"We couldn't have known what was going to happen to Zane," he said slowly. "But what happened to him was terrible and we're going to fix it now that we do know. As much as we can."

"Is it something we can even fix, do you think?" Cleo asked. She was flipping through pictures again - mostly of herself, Rikki, Bella, Emma. Lewis featured in some, though he had mostly been the one to take them. Occasionally, Zane's smiling face appeared. Lewis thought about the Zane he had seen a few hours ago, and how he wondered if he was even capable of smiling anymore.

"I think we can still do our best to fix things," he said, convincing himself with his words. "Only the dead are beyond hope."

Cleo gave a joyless laugh.

"Or Linda Denman, I guess."

Lewis didn't want to respond to that and instead ushered Cleo towards her room, prompting her to pack a quick bag of two nights' worth of items. They didn't know exactly how long they'd be in Melbourne, and it was better to travel light. They could always buy a few additional essentials if they needed them. Cleo rushed to put on a long-sleeved jacket and jeans. Outside, the summer sun was boiling, but even though she had gotten comfortable with rapidly removing water from herself without much notice and she had flown before, it was always better to take fewer risks and the extra layers wouldn't hurt while she was travelling inside an enclosed space for an hour.

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The flight was entirely uneventful and they hurried out of the airport and towards the car hire shop. They had already decided it would be better to have access to their own car, just in case. In case of what, Lewis wasn't quite prepared to say out loud, but mentally he told himself that if things went pear-shaped, they weren't exactly going to be able to call an Uber.

As Lewis began to punch the hotel coordinates into the little grey Toyota's navigation system, Cleo turned to Lewis. She hadn't said a word during the flight, which was already out of character for her, but he had ascribed it to a general emotional exhaustion coupled with the adrenaline from having to move quickly and the anxiety that underpinned it all.

"Lewis, what did they do to Zane?" she asked quietly.

"Turn right and continue for 400 metres," the navigation announced into the silence that followed.

Lewis began to drive, not quite knowing what to say.

"He didn't tell me everything," Lewis began, hedging and trying to figure out a way to avoid telling her even the little he knew.

"He told you something, though," Cleo insisted. "You said it would give you nightmares."

What could he tell her? Zane hadn't exactly catalogued what had been done to him. Some of it was evident without having to be told. He had seen the scars around Zane's wrists, peeking out from beneath his long sleeves, and assigned that to some form of handcuffs, probably kept on for too long without any kind of care for the damage they could inflict. There was the fact that Zane was wearing a turtleneck on the 5th of December in the heat - that indicated some kind of injury to his neck. He didn't really want to think about that. Zane had told him about the ongoing experiments at the start to determine what his healing abilities entailed. The repeated cuts and scrapes and scars as they removed scales from his tail or took samples of his skin, which showed up as scars and injuries on his human body. Zane had even started to explain how he had broken his leg - how it had been broken on purpose - before he caught himself and changed the subject. That was a short list and Lewis knew there had to be more. He was trying not to think about it too hard.

"Lewis? You can tell me," Cleo insisted.

"They were experimenting to see how he could heal," Lewis said, choosing a non-answer. "They tested to see how injuries would show up on him and whether he - his scales and so on - could be used to heal other people. It worked. They found a way to make a drug that could shrink tumours and reverse dementia."

Lewis paused before adding, bitterly, "A damn miracle."

"That's not really what I asked," Cleo said.

"I don't know what to tell you," Lewis replied, trying to concentrate on the road. Why did there have to be so much traffic? "It's what he told me."

"But you said that—"

"They tortured him, Cleo!" Lewis burst out, unable to contain his frustration any longer. It wasn't frustration with Cleo, it was frustration with himself, with the situation, with the awful thought that a man he considered his friend had been subjected to the cruellest treatment imaginable, and then some. "I didn't ask for a detailed account, OK? I came home and he was in our house - he'd climbed in the window, for fuck's sake. I thought he was there to kill me. Or you. The look in his eyes… You have no idea what it was like. I'd calmed him down a bit by the time you got home, but he was… he was scary. His eyes were like fire."

Lewis broke off and continued to stare at the road ahead, willing the trail of cars to move. They didn't have this time to waste.

"I'm sorry," Cleo said. "I guess I just wanted to know because..."

"Morbid curiosity?" Lewis asked, and regretted his words immediately.

"Of course not!" Cleo exclaimed hotly. "I want to help him. I want to know if we can actually get him medical help! Did you see the way he limped? Who knows what else he might be hiding."

"You're right," Lewis said. "And we'll help him. We will. Let's just... let's just get to Rikki."

They drove on in silence until they reached the Royce 40 minutes later, where Lewis parked up and immediately the two of them headed to the front desk. It had been raining, but thankfully the parking was an indoor structure and they managed to get Cleo inside without incident. It was past ten and the sun had already set and it was quite late, so they headed to the front desk immediately. Nobody else was in the lobby, though there were a few stragglers at the bar.

"We're looking for Rikki Chadwick," Lewis said breathlessly, and the night manager smiled.

"Fans?" he said indulgently, looking at Cleo's winter-ready outfit askance.

"Friends," Lewis replied. "She's expecting us, Lewis and Cleo McCartney."

The night manager looked sceptically at them, but then turned to his computer, looked up a number and picked up the phone. Lewis and Cleo watched him wait for an answer, growing increasingly agitated. Rikki was a light sleeper, so she would have answered if she were in her room. Why wouldn't she be in her room at this hour?

The night manager replaced the receiver and stared down at them haughtily.

"I'm sorry, it seems that Miss Chadwick isn't available. Are you sure she was expecting you?"

Cleo and Lewis exchanged a glance. Leave it to Rikki to rebel and head out on the town when they had asked her to stay put and wait for them.

"We should have called her and told her our flight changed," Cleo muttered, and Lewis dismissed her with a wave of his hand. Rikki would do what she wanted, it didn't matter how many warnings they gave her. He took out his mobile and brought up Rikki's number. It went immediately to voicemail, and that was when Lewis felt his stomach really begin to churn with anxiety.

"She's not... her phone's off," he said.

The night manager was now looking at them as though they were unwelcome and was about to say something polite-but-not to get them to leave, when Lewis saw a woman in a hotel uniform come up to him and start to chat. He watched the exchange, trying to follow their whispers, as Cleo repeatedly dialled Rikki, leaving increasingly frantic messages.

"...just asking about that girl, the diver, you know? Said they're friends."

"Oh! Chadwick, yeah? I saw her stagger out about an hour ago, completely legless. Her friend basically had to carry her."

Lewis immediately interrupted.

"Excuse me, you saw her?"

The night manager's face fell.

"You do know that it's rude to eavesdrop," he said flatly, but Lewis brushed that off.

"Where did they go? Who was she with?"

The woman shrugged. "I just saw them get in a car. Sorry."

Lewis and Cleo exchanged another look as Cleo finally pulled her mobile away from her ear.

"Thanks," Lewis said tersely, then he grabbed Cleo by the arm and they walked back towards the doors.

"What do we do now?" Cleo asked anxiously. "What if it's her? Zane's Sylvia?"

Lewis groaned. Maybe it was just coincidence. A girls' night out, irresponsible Rikki doing irresponsible things. But of course, they couldn't be so lucky. Who did she know in Melbourne? He was trying to figure out what to do next, when a thought occurred to him.

"I know the name of the company," he said quietly, more to himself, but Cleo heard him.

"What company?"

"The one that Denman did the research for. It's called Theramar."

He started typing away furiously on his mobile when it pinged. The message had come from Rikki's number and it was an address. Lewis stopped breathing for a moment.

"What is it?" Cleo asked, leaning over to look. He showed her.

"What is that?"

Lewis gulped.

"Bait."

Cleo seemed to process that information for a minute. Then, she shook her head.

"How would this person know to send you a message? Why you?"

"Because you called her from my number, remember?" Lewis reminded her.

Cleo gave him a worried look.

"Why send this, though?" she insisted. "It's not as thought they'd want us to go breaking down the doors to get her, if this woman does have her. And we don't even know that that's what actually happened!" "It's a safe bet," Lewis muttered. "Come on, let's get to the car, they're staring at us."

He gestured towards the doors and Cleo followed him, keeping to the covered footpath that led to the underground parking structure. Lewis was deep in thought, possibilities and risks all whirling around in his head at the same time.

"Maybe she thinks it's Zane's number," he suggested aloud. Cleo looked at him, confused.

"Zane threatened her, why would she be goading him to come get Rikki?" Cleo asked. A reasonable question. Why prod the sleeping dragon? Unless this woman knew something he didn't know, or...

"She wants him out of the way for certain," Lewis affirmed. "Something that will keep him away for good. Something she can only do in person."

Cleo shook her head again.

"Why take the risk? You said he looked dangerous when he first came to see you - could she be so stupid?"

"She's not stupid," Lewis said. "Think about how carefully she got Rikki out of the way. No suspicion. Out for a late night, drunk, who'd stop her? No, this is something else."

They'd reached the car and climbed in by this point.

"We can call the police," Cleo suggested. "Give them the address."

"Absolutely not," Lewis said immediately. "Who knows just how 'legless' Rikki might be at the moment? Last thing we need are more witnesses."

"So you and I will go," Cleo said firmly. "We can't just sit around. She might move her. She might do anything. We don't have a lot of time."

"We could try and find Zane first," Lewis suggested weakly, and Cleo rolled her eyes.

"We didn't know how to do that when he had just jumped into the water near our house - we don't even know where he is right now, or how to contact him. No, we need to go now. Rikki needs us."

Lewis sighed, resigned. He knew that she was right, of course, but that didn't make this any easier.

"Then I'll go. You stay in the car, and wait for me," he said. His tone did not invite argument, but that didn't stop Cleo from trying.

"No!" she said. "I'm coming with you. You don't have any weapons, and who knows what they've got?" "She's got Rikki, which means she knows about Rikki, which means it's very likely that she knows about you!" Lewis raised his voice.

"So what if she does?" Cleo said. "Let her! I've got powers, remember? I'm not just going to roll over and let her chain me up."

"I don't like it, Cleo," Lewis said, the beginnings of anger coming into his voice. "If it is a trap, if she knows it's you and not Zane..."

"We can't just leave Rikki," Cleo said, signalling the end of the conversation. "We're both going. Now."

Lewis gave her a dirty look, a rarity in their long relationship, and turned on the engine. She was determined. He wasn't going to stop her. Fine.

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The address turned out to be in a quiet office park. Lewis wasn't sure what he was expecting - a warehouse, or a lab, encircled by barbed wire and tall fences. Instead, it was a perfectly ordinary building, only three stories, gleaming in the moonlight. It had still been raining, so he drove as close as possible to the entrance, and pulled out an umbrella to hold over Cleo. Cleo stepped out, holding one hand out and manoeuvring the raindrops around her body. They walked together, steadily, towards the entrance. The buildings around them were all dark, but the one they were headed for was illuminated on the second level.

"This is a very bad idea," Lewis muttered.

"It's the best bad idea we've got," Cleo retorted.

As they stepped towards the doors, they slid open. Lewis knew he had been right, of course. They were expected. Somebody was, at any rate. He really wished he had brought some kind of weapon.

They gently walked up the steps, trying to avoid making a sound. Cleo had removed the water from the bottoms of their shoes, so there wasn't a squeak. They approached the second level and saw the name 'Theramar' on the door.

"This is it," Cleo said, looking at Lewis urgently.

He nodded, and, before he could do anything else, Cleo darted forward, through the doors that easily swung open and ran behind a pillar. The light was coming from further inside the building and she waved her arm towards Lewis frantically, gesturing for him to join her behind the pillar. He looked around a few times and moved again. They could hear sounds in the distance. Faint human voices.

Lewis looked at Cleo and was about to mouth the words, "Stay here," when the lights abruptly went on around them and, what was worse, the overhead emergency sprinklers went off.

Lewis watched with horror as he realised that Cleo didn't have time to remove the droplets from her body, or run back to the stairwell without making a sound or getting more water on her. She was already changing.

"Excellent!" a woman's voice said, as Lewis moved to block her from view, unsuccessfully. "A second one. I told you they're pack animals. No one gets left behind."

Lewis' blood boiled at the words, and he cast a look at Cleo, who had already raised herself on her elbows and was gathering a wave of water to blast at the approaching offender. The sprinklers continued to beat down.

"What the hell do you want?" he snarled, hoping to distract them from seeing what Cleo was doing.

"No, no, no!" the woman, who had now come into view alongside a tall, burly man with sandy hair and a miserable expression, said. She waggled a finger towards Cleo, who had raised her hand to shoot the masses of water she had collected at her. Lewis was surprised to see how young she was. She looked like she was in her 20s, the same as them.

"Cleo, now," Lewis hissed, but the woman interrupted.

"Do you really think I'd leave myself open like that? Anything happens to me, and your friend is dead."

Cleo hesitated for just a moment, and it was enough for the man to run towards her and grab her arms. The wave of water collapsed around them and sloshed on the already-sodden carpet.

"No!" Lewis snarled, moving towards her, but the man was already holding something to Cleo's neck. A syringe. He heard her whimper and turned, fuming and terrified, to the woman. Clearly she was in charge here.

"What do you want?" he asked again.

The woman - this must be Sylvia - raised her eyebrows.

"Do you need to ask?"

Lewis heard himself growl. He felt completely powerless, unable to do anything, and kept looking towards Cleo, whose eyes had gone wide and who had completely stilled her body.

"You can go now," Sylvia said, waving a hand towards him, as if to dismiss him. "Thank you for bringing her along. We've got it from here."

Lewis swallowed and tried again, in a more conciliatory tone.

"Please," he started. "We just want to leave. We don't want anyone to get hurt."

"Good," Sylvia replied, nodding curtly. "Neither do I. I'll take good care of them, and if they behave, they'll even get to spend some time together. That's more than the other one got."

"You're crazy if you think I'm just going to leave my wife like this," Lewis snapped.

Sylvia frowned and crossed her arms.

"Marriage is progressive now, isn't it? Even here in Australia. Still, not progressive enough for inter species relationships, I'd say."

"You evil b—"

"You can do better," she interrupted with a smirk.

Lewis stared between Sylvia and Cleo, who now had tears running down her face. The man was still holding both her arms behind her back with one hand while he pressed the syringe close to her neck with the other.

"Lewis," Cleo whimpered, and his stomach leapt up into his heart. What was he supposed to do? Think, Lewis, think!

"James, please move it into the adjacent room," Sylvia said, and Lewis watched, frozen, as the man stood up, still holding the syringe to her neck and still with a firm grasp on Cleo's wrists. He began to pull her towards the back of the office, dragging her along the carpet as she gasped in pain. He was pulling her arms back too far, he was going to pull her arms out of their sockets—!

The sprinklers suddenly stopped, and Sylvia looked up, surprised. The sound of the man dragging Cleo along the carpet also stopped.

"I didn't turn that off," she said, looking behind Lewis.

Lewis whirled around and saw a man's shape silhouetted against the door.

"I warned you," Zane said, his voice shaking badly. "I told you what would happen if you went after Rikki. I told you."

Sylvia eyed him warily and Lewis took this moment to realise that Zane was soaked through, either from the rain outside or the sprinklers.

"Nice trick," she said, putting on the smirk again, though Lewis could tell she was rattled. Why hadn't Zane changed?

"I warned you," Zane repeated. "Why didn't you listen?"

He looked like he was about to cry and when Lewis looked at him, he didn't even acknowledge his presence.

"If you do anything to me, she dies," Sylvia said quickly. At this point, Lewis saw that James had let go of Cleo and was moving towards Sylvia. Cleo was left stretched out on the carpet, watching the scene unfold.

It all happened within seconds. Lewis was about to move towards her when he heard Sylvia moan and turned just in time to see her collapse to the ground. Cleo shrieked and he ran towards her.

"I didn't want this to happen, mate, I swear," James was saying, raising his hands in surrender as he stared fearfully at Zane and stepped backwards. "I tried to tell her it was a bad idea."

"You helped her," Zane said, and his words had gone from emotional to completely toneless.

"I... she made promises and threats, and I just..."

"Shut up," Zane snapped, and James winced. If the scene wasn't so terrible, Lewis would have found it extremely funny to see James, who was 2 metres tall and built like an ox, cowering in front of Zane who, although bulkier than when he was a teen, was still relatively small next to that monster of a man.

"Where is she?" Zane demanded with that same toneless expression.

James pointed behind him, to the far end of the offices, and Zane walked, dragging his leg, towards it.

"But... wait! She wasn't bluffing!" James called after him.

By this point, Cleo had dried herself off and was drying off a path through the carpet toward the exit. She stood in front of James and demanded to know what he meant by that.

"She wasn't bluffing about your friend dying," James said quietly. "She injected her with this stuff."

He held up the syringe.

"She has an antidote, but I don't know where..."

"She had an antidote," Lewis corrected. "Shit! Where is it?"

James shook his head.

"She didn't tell me, she just... she used to use it on him. To make sure he didn't escape."

Lewis moved towards Sylvia's prone form and began to search her pockets, patted around her neck. He tried not to notice the expression of pure pain on her face. He also tried not to think about what it was that Zane had done. She was definitely dead, her eyes glassy and staring.

"Nothing," he said to himself, moving back towards where Cleo was standing, her hand held out and a kind of watery lasso wrapped around James.

"Let him go," Lewis said wearily. "If Zane comes back... Just let him go."

Cleo looked incredulous.

"Are you kidding? After what he did? After what he's seen?"

"The alternative is worse," Lewis said, hating the circumstances.

"You'll never see me again, I won't bother any of you," James said, all in a rush. "I swear, I swear, just let me go."

Lewis nodded at Cleo and she sighed and lowered her hand. The water collapsed to the ground and she stepped back to avoid getting splashed. James immediately turned and run towards the stairs and out of the building.

"Lewis, the antidote?"

Lewis shook his head anxiously, and looked across the office, towards where Zane had just gone. Cleo followed his gaze and took off running behind him. He followed behind her, scanning every possible place in the now-well-lit office for where she might have stored the antidote. There were endless rows of desks, drawers and cabinets. They'd have a difficult time even knowing where to start. As he walked inside the room, he saw that Zane already had Rikki in his arms and was carefully making his way out of the room. Her face and upper body were buried in his chest, while her tail hung over the side of his arm. Once again, Lewis paused to wonder how Zane was doing this - if he really was what he claimed, why wasn't he changing?

Zane set Rikki down on the floor just outside of the door, and Lewis exchanged a look with Cleo, who was staring, horrified, back into the room. Lewis could just about make out that the room contained what looked like a tiny glass tank, half full of water. He shuddered and looked down at Rikki. Her body was curled up and Zane was hovering over her.

"Zane! We can't find it!" Cleo exclaimed, wringing her hands and casting her eyes all around the office, trying to find something, anything that might tip them off.

"Mate," Lewis said warily, placing a hand on Zane's shoulder. Zane jerked around to face him, staring at him blankly.

"The guy said that whatever they poisoned her with, they used to use on you," he explained softly. Rikki moaned and shivered again, and something seemed to click behind Zane's eyes.

"Well. That's…" he started to say, then bit out a curse under his breath. He turned to Lewis and looked at him, his face a bit more animated now.

"I can fix it, but it might make me... I might lose consciousness," he said. "Just don't leave me here. Please."

Lewis' eyes widened and he nodded solemnly.

"Promise," he said.

Zane nodded a curt thanks, then turned back to Rikki, murmuring something to her. He placed a hand on her neck and then withdrew it. He then made a quick brushing motion with his left hand and Lewis realised that he had just cleared every drop of water away from both of them. They were bone dry and Rikki had changed back. So it was true.

Cleo and Lewis both moved back, watching, as he slowly moved his hands just over Rikki's prone body, tracing invisible lines in the air and never quite touching her skin. Rikki whimpered a few times, and then she seemed to lose consciousness completely.

"What is he doing?" Cleo asked, watching him fearfully. Lewis realised that she was worried he might harm Rikki. After all, she had watched him do whatever he had done to Sylvia.

"I'm not sure," Lewis said. "He said he can fix it. The poison."

Another few minutes passed, and Zane continued to trace the lines, gradually drawing his hands back up towards the side of Rikki's neck. He then sat back on his heels, gradually drawing his left hand up and away from Rikki, and Lewis watched, rapt, as a stream of blood emerged from a small cut on Rikki's neck, gradually floating up into the air. With another brushing motion, Zane sent it flying towards the wall. He turned towards Lewis, his face covered in sweat and his long hair plastered to his head, his eyes went wide for a moment, and then, just as he had predicted, he collapsed on the ground.

Rikki sat up just at that moment and stared around her wildly.

"Rikki!" Cleo exclaimed, running over to her. "Are you feeling ok?"

Rikki stammered out an answer, while Lewis moved to inspect Zane. He pulled the collar of his turtleneck down, hoping to check his pulse, and drew back as if stung.

"What is it?" Cleo asked, seeing the sudden motion out of the corner of her eye.

"It's nothing," Lewis mumbled, pulling the fabric back again and carefully placing his fingers at Zane's pulse point. He was still breathing, his heart was still beating. All good signs. He had probably just exhausted himself with whatever that extraction process had been. Lewis looked back at Sylvia's body and, having just seen the burn scars around Zane's neck, had a brief fantasy of resurrecting her and having a go at killing her, too. They'd had Zane in a shock collar - there was no other way to explain those kinds of scars. She had almost had Cleo. She had almost had Rikki.

"Is he ok?" Rikki asked cautiously, moving towards him.

"He'll live," Lewis said quickly. "We need to get out of here."

Rikki shuddered again, and wrapped her arms around herself, looking around at the scene. She spotted Sylvia's body and averted her gaze quickly.

"What about the evidence?" Cleo asked, jerking her head in the direction of the body without actually looking at it. "Our fingerprints are all over this place."

Lewis looked lost for a moment. Whatever Zane had done, there'd be no evidence of any kind of foul play. The same as with Denman. But Cleo was right - they couldn't just leave and expect someone not to go looking. There might be things they hadn't considered. Cleo had been dragged along the floor - maybe a scale had come loose. He sighed wearily, trying to think where to even start.

"I'll do it," Rikki whispered.

Cleo and Lewis both stared at her, and she nodded, as if convincing herself.

"Get out of here, get him out. I'll follow you in a minute."

Lewis paused only for a moment. She had just endured a terrible ordeal and was in no condition to be overusing her powers. But they didn't really have a choice. He nodded towards Cleo and they each grabbed one of Zane's arms around their shoulders and made their way towards the stairs, dragging him between them.

It took ten minutes to get Zane down the stairs without dropping him, by which time, Rikki had joined them. The rain had stopped outside, and the girls walked out carefully, Cleo clearing puddles from their path as they moved towards the car.

They placed Zane in the backseat of the car, upright, and Rikki slid in next to him, casting one last glance at the office building. Smoke was starting to pour from the windows, and Lewis could see a few orange flames licking at the back, where the room had been. He jumped in the front seat quickly, Cleo joining him from the other side, and, starting the car, he placed his foot firmly on the accelerator, leaving the monstrosity of the last few hours behind them.


	9. Chapter 8

Chapter 8

The rush of adrenaline that had powered Rikki for the last few moments abandoned her entirely as she got into the McCartneys' car and she slumped in her seat, putting her head between her knees and giving a low groan. She was aware that the car was moving now, and she felt the pressure of a hand on her back, but she didn't have the headspace for any other thoughts. She simply sat there, shaking, trying desperately to process what had happened. Her thoughts came in rapid flashes - the exposure she felt, lying in the tub, the pain of the poison, the sight of Zane. It all flashed around her, and she continued to shake. She was also aware that her hands and lap were wet now, but she didn't seem to be changing. She had been crying. It was that realisation that brought her out of her frozen, shaking state.

Rikki sat up abruptly, and cursed herself instantly, as her head swam.

"Hey, easy," Lewis said, looking at her through the rear view mirror. "Just take it easy."

"I'm fine," Rikki said, her voice not quite as steady as she had hoped.

"You're in shock," Lewis countered. "We can't really afford a break, but we've got some food and water here."

Rikki looked over at Cleo, who was turned around almost fully in the passenger seat. Her concerned gaze flicked rapidly between Rikki and...

Rikki looked over to her left and saw the shadow of a figure, sitting unmoving in the dark. The road they were currently on was poorly lit and there were few other cars out here at this time of night, but in the flashes of light that came from the occasional car, she could make out Zane's features. His head was pitched back and his arms were lying limply by his sides. She could also see the slight disturbance as his chest rose and fell, which brought her a moment of relief.

"He's just asleep?" she asked cautiously.

"Yeah," Lewis answered, while Cleo turned back to face forward in her seat, her expression inscrutable. "He'll be fine. How are you?" "Alive," Rikki said, raising her thumb on her right hand. "Not trussed up like Christmas lunch, and not poisoned." She raised her index and middle fingers, too, ticking off her 'status update'. "I'd say I'm doing pretty well."

Lewis visibly relaxed at her words, and Rikki couldn't help but smile. She was good at putting on a front when she needed to protect herself, but her friends knew her well enough that the return of her anger and annoyance signalled that she wasn't spiralling.

"Thank you," she said. "For saving me."

Lewis grunted and looked up at the rear view mirror once more.

"We tried," Cleo said, suddenly. "But to be honest, it was not exactly a successful attempt."

Rikki scoffed. "I'm here, aren't I? Can't have gone that badly."

She cast another glance at Zane next to her and wondered what exactly had knocked him out. She hadn't seen anything, he was already unconscious when she woke up from the poison-induced fever dream.

"He saved all of us," Cleo said, so quietly that Rikki didn't hear it at first.

"What do you mean?" Rikki asked. She gave him another long look. "What did he do?"

A long silence ensued, and she saw Cleo and Lewis exchange a look before Lewis faced forward again to concentrate on the empty motorway.

"You told me that Zane was in trouble," Rikki started to say, slowly. "Which, by the way, thanks for the warning that I was the target. You might have told me that some mad bitch—"

"Rikki, it's not that simple!" Lewis exclaimed. "Would you have even listened? We told you to stay inside until we could get to you."

Rikki was about to retort, but pushed the conversation back around again. She wasn't about to let the main point of this go.

"You said that HE was in trouble," she said, indicating Zane with her hand. "So, how exactly is it that not only was I the one who was kidnapped, but he apparently had to do the rescuing?"

Cleo mumbled something.

"Sorry, what was that?" Rikki said, not bothering to hide her irritation. It was easier, she found, to get upset and annoyed with her friends than it was to think of what had just happened to her that night.

"You won't believe me, at first, but I promise it's true," Cleo finally said. Lewis was entirely silent. "He's… he's like us. Zane. He's a…"

She trailed off, and Rikki responded instantly.

"What?! No. No," she insisted. "That's insane. No!"

Cleo nodded and looked to Lewis, who didn't move a muscle.

"Cleo," Rikki began, speaking with more patience than she felt. "It's not possible and I think you know that, for any number of reasons." "It's true," Lewis finally spoke up. "I know it's hard to hear, but it is true. We saw—"

"You saw what?" Rikki retorted. "You saw him erupt in scales? Don't be stupid, Lewis."

She cast a quick look at Zane, who hadn't shifted at all. He continued to breathe deeply and evenly, his face, when it was illuminated by an occasional passing car's lights, in a slight grimace.

"It's insane," she said again, this time as if to herself. "When would he even…? Why would he...?" She cut herself off mid-sentence, annoyed that she had even considered the possibility.

"It's true, Rikki," Cleo said. "This is hard to hear, I know, but he didn't choose it. Denman got him - she changed him - years ago, and he was her prisoner for a long time." Rikki didn't even know how to begin to respond to this. It sounded like the stuff of fiction, like the kind of story that Zane himself might concoct to get her attention.

"Do you realise how—?" she started to say.

"How surreal it sounds?" Lewis interrupted. "Yes, fully aware. But it's true."

Rikki shook her head again.

"It's impossible," she said again, this time sounding a little less certain than before. Whatever this was, Lewis and Cleo seemed convinced enough. And she had been mostly unconscious or out of sight for much of what had happened in the office building.

"Listen, if it were true, if Denman really did change him and had him as a lab rat for the last few years, wouldn't we know about it?" she tried to reason. "I mean, she wanted to expose us! She wanted people to know mermaids were real!"

Cleo shook her head sadly.

"I thought the same thing," she said. "But Denman wasn't calling the shots. It was that other woman, the one who took you. They decided instead of exposing merpeople, they would see what they could make out of them. Out of us."

She paused for a moment, than glanced back at Zane.

"Out of him."

Rikki just shook her head.

"They used him to make therapeutics," Lewis said into the silence. "It wouldn't have made any sense to expose the source of their miracle drug. People get upset thinking about guinea pigs being injected with cancer cells, what would they have made of a sentient person, who would inevitably have been recognised? It was in their interest to keep him a secret."

Rikki swallowed, hard. In a sick sort of way, it did make sense. But of course, a great many other things didn't.

"It doesn't explain why Denman would have gone for Zane, though," she insisted. "If she knew we were still… If she knew that, why go for him, and not us?"

"Use your brain, Rikki," Lewis snapped. "If one of you girls went missing, there would be an uproar and a huge search, police, all the bells and whistles. People would care. People would notice you were gone. And if they found you, they'd get you free, mermaid or not. Denman would lose her test subject and her enterprise. Not to mention, she knew you girls weren't totally defenceless. She had seen your powers. Why antagonise you unnecessarily?"

"But—"

"Rikki, remember when we first turned?" Cleo spoke up. "How confused and scared and, well, powerless we were? That's what she needed. She needed someone who couldn't fight back. Someone that nobody was looking for."

"Zane wasn't some homeless orphan," Rikki replied weakly. "He couldn't just disappear."

"We didn't look for him," Lewis said, subdued again. "He didn't have many friends apart from us, no close friends, anyway. And he told me his father had basically told him to get out and stay out of his house after he told him off for working with Denman. So, yeah, he could just disappear."

He paused for a moment and then added, "He did disappear, and nobody went looking."

Rikki shook her head, unwilling to believe that something so awful was possible. She looked over at him again, now frightened by what she might see in the gloom of the car's interior.

"We watched him save your life," Cleo said. "He pulled that poison out of you, and not with a needle. I have no idea how but…"

"You want proof?" Lewis said abruptly. "Pull down his collar, and tell me what you see."

Rikki looked first at the back of Lewis' head, and tried to meet his eyes in the rearview mirror, but he was back to staring at the road ahead, though there wasn't anything to look at, just the soft glow of the dipped lights illuminating the asphalt. Cleo looked at Lewis with a question in her eyes.

"Ok," Rikki said, cautiously, then reached a hand out towards Zane, pulling down the edge of the turtleneck collar a few inches. She stopped and immediately pulled her hand away, letting it roll up again.

"What the hell?" she said.

"It's an electricity burn," Lewis said, and his voice was full of pain. "A scar, anyway. From a shock collar set to a too-high voltage."

Rikki felt all fight and challenge go out of her. It couldn't be real. If it was, the implications were too horrible. But then what else might have caused it? Why were Cleo and Lewis convinced that it was true? She allowed the doubt to dissipate somewhat - this was too big to lie about. And right now, she wasn't in the hands of mad scientists, so something had gotten her free. Somehow she doubted it would have just taken Lewis and Cleo walking in and making demands.

"Did Sylvia intend to go after Zane?" she asked, not quite sure where to start. She saw Lewis' shoulders slightly lower, as if some of the tension he had been feeling had dissipated. Cleo similarly seemed to exhale. She guessed that they had been waiting for her to challenge their narrative some more, though she wasn't in the mood for that.

"She wanted you," Lewis said. "Zane came to tell us that. He escaped from Denman and Sylvia a while back and, for a while, I guess, they had enough material to keep making the drug. But they were starting to run out, so…" "So they needed a mermaid," Rikki finished for him. "Why me?"

"Why not you?" Lewis replied. "Think about what I said earlier. You might be famous now, but how hard would it be to pretend you'd gone out on your own on one of your secretive dives and never resurfaced? You're pretty isolated. If Zane hadn't told us, we wouldn't have even known there was something to worry about."

"I still don't understand," Rikki said, getting frustrated again. Then, a thought hit her.

"How did you find me?"

"She messaged us the address from your number," Cleo said with a grimace.

"What?! Why?"

"Because she thought my number was Zane's," Lewis said. "From when I called you earlier. She wanted him to come find you because she thought she could control him and make him suffer for dismantling her project. For what he did to Denman. That's my guess anyway. That particular fuck-up cost her."

This only raised more questions, and as Lewis and Cleo took turns explaining and answering those questions — about what had happened to Denman, how little they actually knew about what had happened to Zane in the last six years, what they thought might happen if he went to save her — she realised one thing they weren't talking about. The body that she had seen in the office - Sylvia's body.

"He killed her, didn't he?" she said, more to herself.

Cleo nodded while Lewis went back to a sullen silence.

"That's what you were afraid of, what you were trying to prevent," she realised, aloud.

She lapsed into silence, then, thoughts whirling in her head. Her eyelids were growing heavy again, and she wanted more than anything to allow herself to fall into the blissful void of sleep. Cleo must have realised this.

"Get some rest," she said gently. "Sleep. We have hours still to go."

"Where are we going, exactly?"

"Home," Lewis said. "Then we sort out our alibis, go from there. Cleo's right, you need to get some rest. Whatever that woman drugged you with to knock you out isn't conducive to proper sleep."

"You're going to drive all the way from Melbourne?" she asked incredulously.

"Can't exactly fly," Lewis said, nodding his head towards Zane.

Rikki wanted to argue, but she was hit with another wave of exhaustion, and simply yawned and allowed herself to nod off, looking one last time through bleary eyes at Zane, who hadn't moved an inch.

H20H20H20H20H20H20H20H20H20H20H20H20H20H20H20H20H20H20

Rikki was woken from troubled dreams by the sound of a strangled cry and then scuffling. Her eyes shot open and she looked over to see Zane sat upright and looking around wildly, as Cleo, who was fully turned around in her seat, tried to make calming motions with her arms while repeating, "It's ok. It's ok."

"Where are we?" he asked, not acknowledging Rikki. His question seemed to be directed towards Lewis.

"We'll be passing Sydney soon," Lewis replied, and Rikki saw how anxiously he looked back at him. Was he afraid of Zane?

"Good," Zane said abruptly. "Stop the car."

Lewis huffed, looked back fearfully again, and shook his head.

"We're in the middle of the motorway, Zane," he said, sounding like he was on tiptoes. "I can't just…"

"Fine. Next exit we pass."

Lewis swallowed and nodded, then kept looking ahead of himself.

Rikki had watched this exchange, anxiety growing in her chest as she watched Zane. The sun was starting to rise and she could see him properly now, along with things she hadn't seen while he was unconscious in the dark. She could see the way his eyes were wide and manic, like an animal that had been cornered. She could see the way his hair had started greying, contrasting with his youthful face. She noticed his right hand, then.

"Your hand is shaking," she said softly.

He swivelled to look at her, then down at his hand, then back at her.

"It does that," he said, his voice harsh.

He looked away again, down towards his shoes.

"Nerves," he almost whispered.

"You don't have to be nervous anymore," Rikki said, in what she hoped was a reassuring tone.

"No," Zane replied, his voice louder and his tone icy. "The nerves are damaged. So it shakes."

He turned away from her and stared out the window as Rikki, for her part, felt slightly faint. This wasn't a story anymore. It wasn't even a nightmare. It was cold, harsh reality. The Zane she had last seen six years ago in her bedroom, confessing (lying, as it turned out) that he'd been making up stories about Linda Denman, was almost entirely gone. This man was almost a stranger, and he frightened her. She could see Cleo's shoulders shaking gently - she was crying.

They drove on in silence. She decided that it was probably best to leave him alone for now. They could speak when they got to Lewis and Cleo's. A good, long talk.

"Here! Turn off here."

Rikki's thoughts where interrupted by Zane's shout, and Lewis obliged, pulling off at the exit without saying a word.

"What are you doing?" Rikki demanded. "We're going back to the Gold Coast."

Lewis did not reply, but shot her an imploring look in the rearview mirror. Zane had moved towards the middle of the seats and was staring intently ahead.

"Keep going, that way," he said, pointing ahead with his left hand. The one that didn't shake.

Rikki didn't know what was going on exactly, and she didn't like it. Surely Lewis didn't mean to just leave Zane here? Maybe he was just going to humour him with a stopover.

They drove on for a while, winding through suburban streets, and Zane staring intently ahead the entire time, until he pressed a hand against Lewis' shoulder.

"Here!" Zane shouted suddenly. "Stop here, let me get out."

"Zane—" Rikki started to say, reaching out for him, but Lewis had already pulled up and even before the car stopped moving, Zane had pulled the door open. The smell of the sea hit Rikki as it opened, then he shut it abruptly and she watched as Zane got out of the car and began walking away, heavily favouring his right leg.

She reached for the door on her side and found it was locked.

"Lewis, it's locked," she told him. "Open it, I'm going after him."

"No."

"What did you say?" Rikki asked, incredulous.

"He's dangerous, Rikki," Lewis said steadily. "I'm not letting you get hurt."

"It's Zane!" she exclaimed. "He'd never hurt me!"

"You didn't see him, Rikki," Cleo said, and it was clear from her voice that she was still crying. "What he did to that woman."

"Are you really going to lament the death of someone who hurt him like that? Who was going to hurt us?" Rikki demanded, though she didn't like the churning in her stomach at the discomforting thought that Zane had killed someone. Intentionally.

"Rikki, please," Lewis said, a bit of his own emotional state leaching into his words. "Please, just leave him for now. If he wants to come back to us, he will, ok?"

"That's not good enough for me," Rikki said, suddenly reaching over, unlocking the door and bolting out. She could just about make Zane out at the end of the road, moving forward quickly, even with the limp.

"Zane!" she called after him, trying not to shout too loudly. It was still early, and the houses that lined the little suburban street leading towards the beach and the water were still just waking up. He didn't slow down or seem to hear her at all. She began to jog towards him, ignoring how impractical the shoes she was wearing were for the task. She hadn't exactly planned any of what had happened when she headed down to the hotel bar yesterday afternoon.

She caught up to him, and repeated his name, her voice still somewhat hushed. She reached out and grabbed his left forearm. He stopped moving and she could feel the way his arm stiffened. All of him seemed to stiffen.

"What?" he demanded.

"I…" Having caught up with him, Rikki realised that she didn't know what to say, exactly. "I just want you to come back with us. Back home, to the Gold Coast. Just for now."

The words had flowed from her mouth and she had watched the expression on his face grow stormier with each word.

"It's not my home," he spat out, and tugged his arm to loosen her grip, but she held firm.

"Zane, I'm so sorry for what happened to you, and we're going to do whatever we can to make it right but—"

"I don't want your guilt," he said in a voice that was suddenly soft, and scary. "I don't want your pity. It's over. Goodbye."

"This isn't guilt or pity, Zane!" Rikki insisted, not allowing herself to feel intimidated, though she couldn't deny that she was frightened of him in a way she had never been before. "This is us caring about you! Wanting to help you!"

"Us?" he repeated, a trace of the old Zane audible in the disgusted tone. "Haven't you heard from 'us' how beyond help I am?"

Rikki swallowed. He must have heard something from Lewis and Cleo, maybe while she had been asleep in the car. Or maybe he could see it spelled out on their faces, the way she had seen.

"I don't think you're beyond help," she said.

"It doesn't matter," he said. "You need to leave now, Rikki. I don't want to hurt you."

"You'll never hurt me," Rikki said, with more confidence than she felt.

"The Zane you knew would never hurt you," Zane said. He was looking her directly in the eye as he spoke, seeming to want a reaction. "He's gone. I'm what's left."

She wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

"Stop it!" she said, raising her voice a little. "Nobody's saying you have to move in, but come back with us, help us figure things out."

"There's nothing to figure out. The danger's over for you. You're welcome."

He did succeed in pulling his arm out of her grasp and continued to limp away, towards the beach, which was now only twenty metres away. Rikki was momentarily stunned, but managed to recover herself and briskly walked to catch up with him. She grabbed his shoulder to stop him and he whirled on her.

"Don't TOUCH me!" he nearly screamed at her.

In that moment, Rikki realised that so much of what Cleo and Lewis had been telling her was true. This Zane was more than just frightening - he was unpredictable. He was wild.

"Please come back with us," Rikki pleaded, though her plea was not as fervent this time. Did she actually want to get back in a car with this man for the nine hours it would take to get home?

"Leave me alone," Zane ordered. "Why are you doing this?"

"Because I… I still lo—" Rikki managed to get out, before Zane's hand was at her throat. Though he didn't touch her skin, she could feel a pressure settle in around her neck and she realised that he was choking her. She put her hands up to her throat and tried to push his hand away, but he had already stepped back and she continued to struggle for air, as his eyes bore into her, angry and frightened.

Rikki could suddenly hear Lewis saying something behind her as he ran closer, though she was starting to see spots around the edges of her vision, and she saw that Zane's eyes had moved from her to look at him. He glanced back at her once, quickly, then lowered his hand.

"Get out of here," he said, rage etched in every line of his handsome face, and then he turned.

Rikki collapsed to the pavement, coughing and gagging. She took long pulls of oxygen, and she soon felt hands on her shoulders.

"Come on, Rikki," Lewis said to her gently. "Let's go."

Rikki realised that she was sobbing involuntarily and she looked up to see that Zane was halfway across the beach. She allowed Lewis to pull her to her feet and walk her back to the car, though she didn't notice much of what was going on around her. Her only thought was that Zane, her Zane, had almost choked her to death.

When she sat back down in the car, Cleo had moved into the backseat and she wrapped her arms around her old friend, burying her face in her shoulder and allowing herself a few more silent sobs. The car began to move again.

"It'll be ok," Cleo said, her voice soothing despite the slight tremor. "It'll all be ok."

"How?" Rikki asked hoarsely, shocked by the sound of her own voice. "Things will never be ok."

Cleo didn't respond, and Rikki allowed the silence to envelop both of them, as Lewis drove on, not saying a word.


	10. Chapter 9

A/N: A content warning here, I suppose, insofar as some pretty atrocious things are described. Poor Zane. Heading into the final chapters now – would love to know if you are still engaged in the story!

Chapter 9

How could she? How did she dare to say, to even attempt to say, that she loved him? Her words had made him see red. What did she know about love? She was so deluded. Her perspective on love was a child's. Her view of the world and of him was nothing more than a little girl's.

Zane had run, as best he could manage with his hobbled leg, towards the beach, not looking back at the people he both despised and wanted desperately to rejoin. He had known that Lewis was afraid of him from the moment he saw him yesterday, and as for Cleo… the way she had looked at him made it clear that she had seen exactly how viciously he had acted towards Sylvia. So be it. It had to be done, he told himself, over and over again. She wouldn't have stopped otherwise. Hadn't she shown that by not just pursuing Rikki, but also trying to go after Cleo?

As he neared the water, he slowed down, sure that what he had just done to Rikki meant that they would never again try to follow him or find him. If witnessing his execution of a woman they didn't really know wasn't enough to persuade them that he was a monster, injuring Rikki would certainly do the job. They couldn't know that he would never have let her be in any real danger. He just needed to send a message.

He glanced around himself and began wading into the shallows. The beach was flat, and he would need to walk out quite far to reach any kind of depth. He held back the change with a little bit of effort as he made his way out to the deeper waters. It was an accident, almost, that he had discovered how to control the transformation. It wouldn't have happened at all if it hadn't been for the experiment that involved seeing what would happen if they kept him away from water for an extended period of time. He had been kept locked inside the cell for days, given only a small amount of water each day to drink to keep him alive and monitored closely as he drank it, his wrists cuffed behind him and someone standing at attention with the glass and a straw. It was humiliating on top of everything else, but then again, what part of his torture wasn't humiliating?

After three days of this treatment, he started to become delirious, begging for water, for any kind of relief. He understood enough about the curse, as he thought of it, to realise that his human body and his _other_ body were linked, but not quite the same. His human body was infinitely weaker, and seemed to take the punishment exacted on him in either form, while his other body remained, essentially, pristine. Even after everything, every injury, every degradation, he would change and every scale would be in place, his upper body unmarked, his hand back to normal. What he had not realised until that moment was that his other body had demands, and that even if he were free and had decided that he would stay away from water and never change, his other body would assert itself. The delirium came first, followed by what felt like a terrible fever, and then finally, every nerve screaming at him. One day, he didn't know how long after they started with their experiment, he had been huddled on the cot, with a thin blanket wrapped around himself. And suddenly, it was like the fever broke, and he understood, with a kind of feral clarity, exactly how he could change, with or without water. So he did, under the blanket and praying that nobody was watching him on the perpetual camera feed in the cell, he transformed into his other body without a drop of water, and breathed a sigh of relief. Moments later, he changed back.

The experiment had continued for another two weeks, and he had found that a small sliver of time spent in his other body was enough to stave off the worst symptoms. He hid himself away when he did change, and eventually, they grew bored and decided that they weren't seeing what they expected, though he still didn't understand what this particular treatment was meant to show them. Did they just want him to suffer? Probably.

After he had gotten free, after those lost months, he had come back around to the idea that had asserted itself during that particularly cruel experiment. If he could change into his other body without water, it might be possible that he could control the change in the other direction - stay in his human body, even in the presence of water. Sure enough, it was something that he gradually learned to do, with a great deal of practice and pain. That new ability, something the girls had never mastered, had helped him infinitely that night, and had surely been what allowed him to pull one over on Sylvia. She hadn't known he could do that and she thought that, armed with a building of sprinklers ready to go off, and Rikki incapacitated with the same filthy poison she'd used on him, she would be safe and he could be incapacitated.

She was wrong.

He had reached a decent depth, and was starting to tread water, when he allowed himself to change. It was like exhaling after holding his breath for an extended period of time. The pain that he constantly felt in his human body evaporated, and his memory and thoughts lost their sharp edges. They faded into the background, as they so often did when he was in this form, as if this body knew that traumatic memories could be every bit as damaging as broken bones and old burns and scars. He dove under the waves and started to swim, rapidly, towards his destination. It would take time, but he knew where to go and he knew that Lewis, who was no idiot, might figure out where he was headed. If that was the case, he had to get there first, because doing what he had to do in front of them would be worse than anything that had happened tonight.

He tried not to think about that night. He knew, of course, that any hope he might once have held for some kind of future for himself was over. He would do what he needed to do, tie up the loose end, and then he would disappear into the waves and never resurface. He knew that, while he could not stay permanently in his human body without the other side making demands of him, the opposite was not exactly true. He had spent months in the ocean without setting a foot on land, and never suffered for it. If he had been in anything resembling his right mind at the time, it would have scared the shit out of him. As it was, he hadn't been in his right mind. He had only known that this way, he did not have to suffer.

They had done so much to him. They had had so much time to do it. While Denman, after a while, settled for focusing on her studies and her experiments, slicing and dicing parts of him to get what they needed for their miracle drug, Sylvia had shown a sociopathic tendency to psychologically torture him, as well. After the first few months, she would constantly remind him that he was alone, that nobody was coming to save him, that nobody had even noticed he was missing. She would read emails from his father about how pleased he was with the progress they were making. If there had been passages about his concerns for the wellbeing of the test subject or if he was even aware that their captive was his own son, he had no way of knowing. She never read that sort of thing to him.

He had no way of knowing anything in his prison, except that he was tired and lonely and frightened, and that more than anything, he wanted it all to stop. But nobody had come to his rescue. Nobody who worked for the two women had ever showed the slightest sign of sympathy for the test subject. Sylvia had cottoned on to the leverage that Denman held over him - if he ever tried to escape, they would bring in Rikki. Even when he had learned a few tricks on the sly, the threat to Rikki was enough to keep him as their prisoner and not make any attempts to escape. It had been the one thing he held on to, with ironclad belief. His life was over, had been since the first day he had been brought to that horrible place and pushed into the pool. But Rikki was still out there, and he would do what he needed to, to keep her out of their clutches. Because the truth was, he loved her.

As he swam, his mind came back around to that thought, and what Rikki had been about to say to him before he cut off her air supply. Love was pain and sacrifice. Love was what he had done for her, for years, without expectation of thanks or reciprocation. Love was a sick, twisted thing that revolted him but which he craved more than anything. It was the only thing that gave his reality any meaning. The love he felt for a girl who had never come looking after he disappeared without a trace.

He had done what he needed to do, all for her. Seeing her face again today, so shining and beautiful after all this time, had broken his heart all over again. There was no future for someone as broken as he was, and certainly not with someone as full of life and promise as Rikki. He would be lying if he didn't hope, in some distant part of his mind, that she would accept him as he was and welcome him back. She would understand what he had done for her - for all of them - and she would forgive. The reality, of course, was that he had only seen pity, guilt and fear in her eyes. She would never accept him for who he was, and the only reason she had tried to keep him from leaving was to allay her own guilt. It had to be the truth. If she really loved him, he told himself, he'd know. He hadn't just freed her, he had saved her life.

It had been a long shot, assuming he could remove the poison from her system, and he was infinitely relieved that it had worked. That was another of their tortures that had taught him a new skill. If they had known just what doing it would enable him to do, no chance in hell they would ever have tried it.

He could vaguely remember the first time that they injected him and the poison worked its way into his system. In this body, he processed that memory like a film, something he had observed but not experienced. He had gradually experienced the increasing effects of whatever they had injected into him, but more importantly, he could feel the poison inside himself. It had surprised him, but he realised that it was something he could do - slowly but surely start to move the poison back through his veins and, ultimately, out of his body through a small cut he made on his wrist. It was easy enough to conceal - his wrist by that point was, in his human body, a mass of scars from many too-tight restraints, while in his other body they didn't examine his arms closely.

The first time he had removed the poison, he had feigned illness as they administered the antidote - and then he removed that, too. Working on himself, there was no hand waving required, just his thoughts guiding the poison out. Nobody suspected a thing.

The poison had been Sylvia's idea. She referred to it as a kind of dead man's switch. If he got any ideas about escaping, he'd find himself dead within 24 hours. Maybe she had suspected that he wasn't as helpless after three years as he had been when they first brought him here. Maybe she had even seen him playing with currents under the water in his tank when he thought nobody was looking. Denman had opposed the poison's use as she explained that his blood, which they dutifully drew every day, would be contaminated and useless for days after each injection. He had heard these arguments between the two women and had amused himself by playing up the "pain" he felt. He had managed to draw the poison out long before its effects could start to be felt.

But that experience with the poison had brought another reality to bear for him. He had realised that not only could he feel and almost see (in his head, of course) his own circulatory system, but he became aware of everyone else's, too. He could feel the blood pumping in the veins of those around him, though he tried to tell himself that this had to be a hallucination. Another nightmare to add to the pile. So much of his life, what it had become, was a nightmare. It persisted, though, that sense of life, and of blood flowing, and the realisation that it would take no more than a thought - even if his hands were bound - to stop or alter that flow.

Even with this knowledge, the worst of the tortures had stopped by this time. He was broken and battered, but he wasn't ready to turn murderer just yet, even if it meant escaping. If he did escape, what good would it do, after all? Rikki still had a target on her back, and besides, where would he go? He had nobody in this world - his father had rejected him and, for all he knew, was aware of what had happened. His friends? What friends? And Rikki... well, she would never speak to him again, certainly not after Denman had made him call her and tell her that he had gone to work for her. Could there be a greater betrayal?

He might have stayed their prisoner for good, if it hadn't been for Sylvia's ambition. Though the time after his escape was still a black spot in his memory, utterly indiscernible, he remembered the moments before perfectly well.

He had been in the tank where they kept him most of the time now, floating listlessly around the bottom, when Sylvia had walked into the room, in lockstep with Denman. They gestured to him to surface and he dutifully swam to the top of the tank as Denman climbed the little staircase permanently affixed to its side, all while Sylvia made remarks he couldn't quite hear from the bottom of the tank. Denman first drew a vial of his blood, as she usually did, and then, without warning, stuck the needle full of poison into his neck.

Zane had cried out, more from surprise than pain, and was about to swim back down to the bottom to begin stealthily removing it, when he could properly make out Sylvia's words.

"I've already got Paul and James out tonight, it'll take minutes once they find her boat."

Denman frowned down at her, but stayed at the top of the tank, idly twirling the now-empty syringe in her hand.

"Let's finish this conversation outside," she said finally, and Sylvia huffed.

"Oh, who cares?" she said without even casting a glance Zane's way. "It's not like he can do anything."

"All the same," Denman insisted, her foot still poised at the the top of the next step down.

Zane had stayed put and could feel the slightly numb sensation of the poison making its way through him. He knew he should dive down and start removing it now, but there was something in Denman's look that stopped him. Whose boat? What were James and Paul supposed to be finding? And if James and Paul weren't here, did that mean he was alone with only these two?

"He's already starting to go," Sylvia said, jerking her head towards him, and Zane realised he must look dazed and unfocused as his mind wandered around the possibility of her words.

"Anyway, he'll find out we've got her eventually, won't he? Stupid bitch, she's made it too easy for us."

It didn't take much more than that for Zane to realise what was happening. They were going after Rikki. He didn't know why they had chosen now, or what Sylvia's comment meant, exactly. He wouldn't find out about Rikki's profession and the extreme danger it posed to her until many months later. But he knew that he had to stop it. He didn't bother to dive down - he began to remove the poison in full view of both women, and watched as they turned their heads, astonished, as a stream of yellowish liquid flowed out from the spot on his neck where he had been injected, hovering in midair for a moment before splashing into the tank water. He then turned his eyes on Denman, who was staring at him with astonishment, and before she could do or say anything, before he could even make a decision, he realised that he was already in her head, his thoughts reaching out to a spot where the blood flow could be interrupted. He had done it quickly and thoughtlessly, but he held that sensation, even as Denman collapsed on the stairs and fell halfway down. Sylvia was staring at him, and he turned his eyes to her.

"Rikki?" he asked, realising his speaking voice sounded harsh and otherwordly from lack of use.

Sylvia nodded wordlessly, casting her eyes back to Denman, who was twitching and moaning horribly.

"Stop it!" Sylvia whispered urgently.

"I will," Zane said. "Call them off first."

Sylvia had feigned ignorance initially, but cast a look to Denman's prone form, then Zane's face.

"Ok!" she shouted, raising her hand, with a phone in it. "Just let me make the call."

Zane had stared daggers at her, as the sound of Linda Denman's suffering intensified. The long, agonised gasp that escaped her had finally seemed to penetrate to the part of his brain that was still capable of rational thought and he realised that he was torturing her. He might kill her. Sylvia was already speaking hurriedly into the phone and he released the pressure of the blood that he had been holding back. Denman had stopped twitching and he eyed her from his vantage point at the top of the tank. Sylvia, who had still been on the phone, followed his gaze and saw that she was still.

"You killed her!" she shrieked, running towards her prone form.

"No," Zane said, simply, emptily. And it was true. He could feel her heart working, could feel her lungs moving. She was still alive. But he had also caused terrible damage.

While Sylvia was busy trying to feel for Denman's pulse, he finally had a moment of complete self-control and lack of interest in who might see what he could do. He had raised a wave to carry himself out of the tank, and it spilled him on the ground with a slight thud. Sylvia watched this warily, her hands still at Denman's neck. Zane pulled the water from his body and, for the first time in a very long time, he stood up, though he regretted it almost instantly. Pain blitzed through him, a tidal wave of hurt.

"I'm leaving," he said hoarsely, trying to suppress a yelp as he attempted and stopped trying to put weight on his left leg. He didn't want to give her the satisfaction. "If you ever try to come after me, or after Rikki - if you ever try anything like this again, I will know. And what I did to Denman will seem mild."

Sylvia looked enraged, but she also looked frightened. For all her bullying, she had a sense of self-preservation that had served her well in the past. She was not about to confront Zane in this moment. Not when she had also realised that not only was he powerful enough to end her life, but also that they had given up their leverage by going after Rikki. She let him go.

He didn't remember what had happened after he had stumbled out of the building. There must have been some rationality left in him - he'd gotten clothes, after all, and he'd managed to get to the water. It must have been nearby. Once he was in the water, though, it acted like a sedative. He had forgotten so much and gradually, over the next few months, sparks would return to him. His name, his history, Rikki. It all gradually came back. The damage was done, however, and when he had recovered enough of his mind to realise that Rikki might still be in danger, he had gone back on land to find her. It wasn't a long search - she was growing more famous by the day. He understood, also, why they felt they could just go after her. It would have been so tempting, after all. A mermaid, on her own, diving alone. If she went missing in the sea, there couldn't be much of a search.

In all those years, however, he had one loose end he had never bothered to tie up. The man who had paid for all of his misery, who had funded his torture at the hand of inhuman beasts like Sylvia. Whether he knew the price of his miracle cures or not, Zane didn't really care at this point. He just knew that Harrison Bennett must be made to pay for what he did. He could not be allowed to just carry on with his life, holding the knowledge of just how rich a single merperson could make him and knowing about the girls. Surely, Denman would have told him what she knew about the girls. The temptation would be too great.

Zane knew that there was no chance any of Sylvia's hired hands would try anything without someone like Sylvia directing them - they were survivors and, besides, he had paid them all a visit, late at night, and threatened them with things he had never actually intended to carry out. Too bad that Sylvia had called his bluff in the most horrible way possible.

But the man who had been his father - he had never managed to work up the courage to go to see him. He knew, in part, because there could only be one outcome to such an encounter. He swam on, as quickly as he could manage, preparing himself for the confrontation. There would be no reconciliation. He would tell him what he needed to know and then, he would do what he had already done to another person who had destroyed his life that night. They had all worked to turn him into a monster, and he would only be doing what monsters do.


End file.
